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Advanced membrane technology raises great engineering expectations in fruit juice manufacturing industry
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Wednesday, 23 June, 2021, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Dr A.P.Jayaraman
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A glass of fresh fruit juice is an irresistible attraction. No wonder, the world over this enchanting fascination is expanding remarkably. If numbers give a better narrative, the global fruit and vegetable processing market is an eloquent testimony. It is hovering this year around at a dizzying height of US $230 propelled by a CAGR of 7% for the past four years!
Sweet Route
Irresistibility has its sweet and strong reasons. First and foremost, fruit juices are nutritional beverages that gel well with a healthy diet. It has the true chemical signature that is found naturally in the parent fruits and is also the dream drink nutritionists love to recommend because of its salubrious inventory of a broad spectrum of nutrients with vitamins, minerals, proteins, and protective antioxidants all with a kick of packed energy. Refreshing taste and longer shelf-life make them a class apart. Drinker’s delight and makers’ dream at once.
Enter Engineer
Making juice moved to manufacturing as a majestic industry and engineering became dominant. Driven by concerns of safety and quality, considerations of nutritional value and calculations of process and product cost minimisation with unwavering royal attention on the customer king juice processing plants came up. Sophisticated tools of industrial engineering were skilfully applied to address the problems of traditional and standard methods for the production of single strength or concentrated juices. Labour intensive and protracted operational times were resolved and the industry marched forward.
Royal Customer
Customer delight is juice industrie’s prime mover of the bottom-line. Some customers like clear juice with high transparency and homogeneity. In striking bur refreshing contrast some others love cloudy juice with delicate opalescence. There can be no quarrel with the likes and dislikes of customers. Cloudiness comes in natural fruit juices from the presence of polysaccharides, protein in colloidal suspension, tannins and potassium cation.
Cloudiness loving customers are often very demanding and dislike sediment at the bottom. Meeting their requirement of stable turbidity has been a hard nut to crack. Numerous chemical, physical and enzyme engineering techniques have been brought to bear on this problem with varying degrees of success.
Smart Membranes
A forward marching industry has to be necessarily forward looking too. Red queen effect demands that the industry should run faster today to remain where it was yesterday. The alternative to sheer speed is smartness. An out of the can thinking is necessary in the production process and the novel membrane technology is beckoning with a basket of advantages over the traditional separation processes for juice concentration and clarification. Prominent among them is high selectivity based on unique separation mechanisms. As the process is pressure driven, little thermal stress of processed juice due to moderate operating temperatures.
Juice and heat have an old unholy connection. The word ‘juice’ originates from old French words, "jus, juis, jouis" meaning ’iquid obtained by boiling herbs’. Widely prevalent chemophobia of customers which is mounting day by day, membrane processes do not need addition of chemicals. Added to these definitive advantages are the engineering elegance of seamless scale-up and modular design, lower carbon foot print.
Juicy membranes
The heart of the membrane is the stuff with which it is made. Materials sciences have taken brave new steps and have produces a variety of advanced membranes and know the fine art of tailor making membranes for specific needs. For managing juice industry, polymeric membranes are great clarifiers. They have tell-tale benefits over the poor cousin cellulose acetate membranes as they stand the assault of hypochlorites used in cleaning cycles. But the polymeric membranes are vulnerable to hostile acidity and suffer from short shelf life. The new avatar of ceramic membranes with their remarkable resistance to chemical assault, longer shelf life, easy washability and negligible fouling have changed the landscape of membrane separation technology for juice processing.
Plentiful Processes
Separation technology has come of age making sweet water from salt water and placing membranes in a high proven pedestal. There are no fewer than 16,000 such plants has placed membranes desalination plants across 177 countries, producing 95 million m3 of freshwater in a day! In Chennai, the Minjur Desalination Plant produces 36.5 million cubic meters of water per year and the plant at Nemmeli, Chennai has a capacity of 100 million litres of sea-water per day.
Membrane process is not one monotonous size fitting all. All are pressure driven but membrane pore size matters most. The processes are microfiltration, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis which is the cynosure of technologists for juice clarification, fractionation and concentration. More members have been recently added to the membrane separation family such as osmotic distillation, membrane distillation and pervaporation with their distinctive advantages. Being pressure driven, the product is free from degrading thermal stress.
Sustainability is dovetailed into membrane separation technology. Energy consumption is admirably low and insult or impact to environment is minimal with well-developed RO waste stream management. The global market of membrane technology for food and beverage processing is estimated to reach about $8.26 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 6.8%. Membrane separation technology appears as a sunrise industry.
(The author is president, STEAM Academy, chairman, National Centre for Science Communicators and member, Scientific Committee PCST global Network. He can be reached at drap.jayaraman@gmail.com)
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