DEMINERALIZATION BY ION EXCHANGE OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE PORCINE BLOOD PLASMA

Abstract

ABSTRACT The blood from slaughterhouses constitutes an important waste from the meat industry because of its high pollutant power. The techniques used to recover blood components, such as proteins for human food, require pretreatments to remove inorganic salts. Cationic and anionic ion exchange resins were used to carry out the demineralization process. Capacity experiments were first conducted in batch to study the performance of the resin, and then the operation was carried out in a fixed bed to simulate an industrial operation. Breakthrough curves for the main cations and anions contained in the plasma were obtained, which showed the good applicability of this operation for demineralizing blood plasma. The loss of protein is always below 9%, being slightly higher in the cationic column, while the variation in pH is also greater in the cationic column, although the changes are not important enough to cause substantial denaturalization of the plasma proteins. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONSIon exchange processes are used in food industries in many applications, for instance in sugar production. In this work, the application of ion exchange for the demineralization of blood plasma as a preparative step to the fractionation of the main protein fractions has been demostrated. The results show the potential applicability of the technique, which could be potentially used at the industrial level. The loss of protein in the process is not elevated, and the variation of the pH of the final products is more important in the case of cationic exchange. Ion exchange could be used industrially in the demineralization of other liquid effluents of the food industry containing proteins or other compounds as an operation prior to the preparation of the effluent to separate its components as a first purification step.