Sanitary Membrane Plants
Please browse through the possibilities below. We have plants already operating on most of these applications (refer examples), so contact us for further information.
Typical activities include:
Membrane Plants
Engineering
Plant Expansion
Troubleshooting
Automation Retro-fit
Replacement Membranes
Plant upgrades
Training
Contact us to discuss your particular application
Ultrafiltration
Need to recover or purify a protein stream? Consider some of these applications: plant protein purification; whey protein isolates (WPI90); milk protein concentrates (40 – 85% MPC); whey protein concentrates; skim milk or wholemilk concentration for cheesemilk; skim UF for speciality milk products; brine recovery; blood protein isolation; beer and juice clarification.
Nanofiltration
Nanofiltration can be the perfect answer if you need to demineralise product streams, with examples such as: sweet whey concentration and demineralisation; NF for speciality milk products; salty whey yield recovery; acid whey demineralisation; adding value to waste juice, beer or wine streams; UF permeate concentration; caustic clean-up.
Reverse Osmosis
RO is primarily a concentrating step and is generally recognised as more energy efficient and cost effective than evaporation, as well as avoiding the heat damage of evaporation. The other main application is the production of re-usable water streams. Examples include: whey concentration pre-evaporation; RO of milk for transport savings; UF permeate concentration; concentrating dilute waste sugar, juice, beer or wine streams; evaporator condensate clean-up; NF permeate re-use.
Microfiltration
Microfiltration is the least used of the membrane processes in food and dairy applications, mainly due its tendency to foul and be difficult to run continuously. We have used MF for the cleaning up of brines because it does reject fat and bacteria very well – thus leaving clean brine for re-use. MF is far more useful in water applications due to its high flux performance on clean streams.
Pilot Plants
We have portable pilot plant equipment available for on-site testing of membrane applications. For longer term trials, we can of course custom design and build a pilot plant for your specific application.
Membrane Engineering Services
Because we design our plants from first principle right here, we have the in-house capability to assist with all manner of enquiries about existing membrane plants. The most common services we get involved with are:
- Troubleshooting – responding to those urgent plant performance problems. Often just a phone discussion can start the recovery process.
- Capacity upgrades of existing plants. Most of these have not even been EPI plants originally.
- Change of plant duty - perhaps a new product feed or a new finished product specification.
- Automation of plants – older plants can be made more reliable by retrofitting automatic control
- Plant audits – a “health” check up covering all sorts of areas including equipment issues, plant optimisation, maintenance issues, operating procedures, membrane performance.
- Training – Our operator training courses are geared to practical application. Membrane theory is covered of course, but we then concentrate on the actual plant the operator works with – identifying the key components, discussing the way they can run the plant better and giving them some skills to better handle those crisis situations.
Membrane Replacement
We have excellent working relationships with numerous membrane suppliers, so can offer a wide range of replacement membranes.