On-line Mini-Symposium: Sustainable concentration technologies for Foods & Ingredients

On 5 November a NWGD mini-symposium was held focusing on sustainable concentration technologies. Four speakers from academia and companies gave a presentation. Maarten Schutyser from Wageningen University kicked-off with a presentation on progressive freeze concentration discussing results that were obtained in the IPST project FreezeCon. Major result was the construction of a pilot-scale freeze concentrator with 10 m² freezing surface. The project results showed that this technique is promising for concentration of mixtures with larger molecules such as demonstrated for whey proteins, but less for small molecules such as sucrose because of strong freezing point depression. Alfred Jongsma presented latest developments at Tetrapak related to falling film drying technology. He explained that a new all-electric falling film evaporator system is available now and that especially research is done on film flow behaviour inside these evaporators to reduce fouling and thus improve economy of these evaporators. The third speaker was Lex van Dijk from Blue-Tec, a membrane technology company. He explained about the development of pressure-driven membrane (e.g. Reversed Osmosis processes) and membrane contact processes (e.g. Forward Osmosis processes). He provided some nice application examples such as protein recovery from potato juice and cabbage or watermelon juice concentration. Ruben Halfwerk from Wetsus explained about eutectic freeze crystallization (EFC) to simultaneously recover lactose and ice from a lactose solution. He developed an improved EFC process and demonstrated it to be successful at larger scale for continuous recovery of lactose from whey permeate.

This event was combined with the PhD defence ceremony of Jan-Eise Vuist defending his thesis on Progressive Freeze Concentration.