Ultrafiltration Membrane for Degumming of Crude Palm Oil-Isopropanol Mixture

Abstract

Ultrafiltration (UF) is a membrane technology that has been applied for crude palm oil (CPO) degumming. It is considered as an alternative for the conventional CPO degumming technology because of its lower energy consumption, no need for the addition of chemicals, and almost no loss of natural oil. In this research, we separated a CPO-isopropanol mixture via laboratory-made flat-sheet polyethersulfone (PES) UF. Flux profiles confirmed that the increase in the CPO concentration resulted in lower fluxes. However, increasing the temperature from 30 °C to 45 °C initially raised the flux, but it was further decreased when the feed temperature was raised from 40 °C to 45 °C. Using UF of the CPO-isopropanol mixture at crude oil concentrations of 30 % and 40 %, we were able to reject more than 99 % phospholipids and nearly 93 % phospholipids, respectively. However, the separation of free fatty acids using this process was ineffective due to the small size of free fatty acids. Through the evaluation of the blocking mechanism in the Hermia model, it was proposed that the standard and intermediate blocking were the dominant mechanisms of filtration of CPO at a concentration of 30 and 40 %, and 50 and 60 %, respectively.

Keywords

• crude palm oil
• ultrafiltration
• degumming