Nanofiltration of binary palm oil/solvent mixtures: Experimental and modeling

Abstract

Purification by using membrane technology has been recently considered as an alternative method to the conventional purification of crude vegetable oil. Although there are studies regarding the application of membrane technology on the purification of crude vegetable oil, the research on the separation process performance by considering transport models is scarce. Therefore, in this work, an investigation on the performance of organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) for palm oil and solvent mixtures was carried out. In order to describe and predict the membrane separation performance, the integration of membrane transport model with experimental data is required. Parameter estimation of transport model parameters was conducted to correlate a chosen transport model to the experimental data. In this research, the effect of concentration polarization was also included in the mass transfer of triglycerides, whereby a combined film theory/ solution diffusion transport model was employed. The results revealed that the permeation flux of palm oil and acetone mixtures in SolSep NF 030,306 nanofiltration membrane increased with increasing stirring speed but decreased with increasing feed viscosity. The rejection of triglyceride, on the other hand, increased with increasing feed concentration, however, the rejection did not show any significant trending with the change in operating pressure. This study served as the first attempt to investigate the performance of organic solvent nanofiltration of palm oil by using a solvent resistant membrane through both experiments and membrane transport modeling.