ULTRAFILTRATION.

Abstract

With rapid development of new polymeric membranes which will stand harsh cleaning regimes and higher pressures there will be increasing use of ultrafiltration (UF) in the downstream processing of fermentation products. Yet the process is poorly understood fundamentally and suffers from a number of problems that have not yet been properly solved. A lengthy explanation and discussion of the technique is, therefore, justified. Hence the authors of the chapter briefly discuss the concept of UF module design and the advantages and disadvantages of various systems. Finally, by way of an example it is shown how to scale up a UF plant from research data plus an analysis of the running costs of such a plant.