Study on reaction and separation processes for food

Abstract

In efficient production of food with high quality, adoption of appropriate reaction and separation processes and their optimization are always required. Membrane separation technologies such as microfiltration, ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis have many advantages over other separation technologies because they require less energy and no heat treatment. Their application to food industries has been developed successfully in Japan. Recently nano-filtration technology which is a new category of membrane technology placed between reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration is attracting a great deal of attention. In this paper, study on optimization of these membrane separation processes for liquid food will be introduced in the former half of this paper. Biodiesel fuel（ fatty acid methyl ester） is a replacement for diesel fuel produced from vegetable oil. In Japan, only used edible oil and by-products from oil refining process can be materials for biodiesel fuel because we need to import most of edible oil from foreign countries. However, these materials can not be converted in to biodiesel fuel with conventional alkaline catalyst method because free fatty acid contained in the materials inactivates the catalyst. A new method which does not require any alkaline catalyst will be introduced and its economical efficiency will be demonstrated in the latter half of this paper.