Refining sugarcane juice by an integrated membrane process: Filtration behavior of polymeric membrane at high temperature

Abstract Application of membrane filtration to sugarcane juice refining is appealing because it can eliminate the usage of chemicals, achieve continuous and automated production, as well as produce superior quality of juice. However, some technical problems, such as low permeate flux, high sucrose loss in membrane retentate and serious membrane fouling, are impeding this technological upgrading in sugar industry. In this work, an integrated membrane process consisting of a tubular loose ultrafiltration (UF), a spiral-wound tight UF and a spiral-wound NF was developed to refine the raw sugarcane juice at pilot-plant scale. With a super high volume reduction ratio (VRR) of 20, the loose UF was able to be operated at a flux from 30 to 70 L m −2  h −1 , and the tight UF could run at a flux from 10 to 40 L m −2  h −1 ; at the same time, the color removal kept more than 95%. Moreover, diafiltration operation could recover most of sugar in the UF concentrates, leading to a high sucrose recovery of up to 98% in two-stage UF. A novel cascade diafiltration mode was proposed to save water by 25% compared with the separated diafiltration. Mathematical models could well predict the diafiltration efficiency for the loose UF but not for the tight UF. Permeate flux of the loose UF was dominated by membrane fouling while for the tight UF, osmotic pressure played a more important role in the flux decline. With a suitable cleaning strategy, the performance of this integrated membrane process can be nearly regenerated although the temperature jump between filtration and cleaning (60–30 °C) might result in some foulants accumulating in the membrane system. These results would serve as a valuable guide for process design and practical operation in subsequent industrial application.