Abstract
In recent years, microfiltration (MF) has gained great interest as an excellent technique for clarification of biological suspensions. This paper addresses a direct comparison of efficiency, performance and susceptibility to cleaning of the ceramic and polymeric MF membranes applied for purification of 1,3-propanediol (1,3-PD) fermentation broths and suspensions of yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. For this purpose, ceramic, titanium dioxide (TiO2) based membranes and polypropylene (PP) membranes were used. It has been found that both TiO2 and PP membranes provide sterile permeate during filtration of 1,3-PD broths. However, the ceramic membrane, due to the smaller pore diameter, allowed obtaining a better quality permeate. All the membranes used were highly susceptible to fouling with the components of the clarified broths and yeast suspensions. The significant impact of the feed flow velocity and fermentation broth composition on the relative permeate flux has been demonstrated. Suitable cleaning agents with selected concentration and duration of action effectively cleaned the ceramic membrane. In turn, the use of aggressive cleaning solutions led to degradation of the PP membranes matrix. Findings of this study add to a growing body of literature on the use of ceramic and polypropylene MF membranes for the clarification of biological suspensions.
Highlights
Microfiltration (MF) is one of the oldest membrane technologies [1], which is characterized by operating pressure lower than 0.35 MPa and high permeate fluxes, mainly between 10−4 and 10−2 m/s [2]
The ceramic membrane manufactured by Tami Ind. had both a support layer and a thin active layer made of TiO2 (Table 2)
The new PP membrane, after washing the ethanol with water, shows a strong tendency to push the water out of the pores and part of its volume is again filled by air, which blocks the flow of water through the pores
Summary
Microfiltration (MF) is one of the oldest membrane technologies [1], which is characterized by operating pressure lower than 0.35 MPa and high permeate fluxes, mainly between 10−4 and 10−2 m/s [2]. Over the last two decades, many attempts have been made by researchers to comprehensively investigate the use of MF in the clarification of fermentation broths [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] and yeast suspensions [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]. Nowadays, advanced clarification of biological suspensions can be performed using a wide variety of commercially available MF membranes. According to [35] the global market of MF membranes should increase from $2.4 billion in 2018 to $3.7 billion by
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