Recent advances on membrane processes for the concentration of fruit juices: a review
Introduction
To reduce the storage and shipping costs, and to achieve longer storage, fruit juices are usually concentrated by multi-stage vacuum evaporation. This process results in a loss of fresh juice flavors, color degradation and a “cooked” taste due to the thermal effects. Since consumers generally prefer the flavor, aroma, appearance and mouth feel of freshly squeezed juices, scientists and processors have tried to develop new techniques for retaining such characteristics of freshly squeezed juice in the concentrate and ultimately in the reconstituted juice. The juice industry has developed complex essence recovery, careful process control and blending techniques to produce a good quality concentrate that is acceptable to consumers, but still easily distinguishable from fresh juice. Many efforts have been devoted to develop improved methods such as freeze concentration, sublimation concentration and membranes (ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis) for concentrated juice processing (Chen, Shaw, & Parish, 1993; Köseóglu, Lawhon, & Lusas, 1990). The most promising alternative is membrane concentration.
Membrane processes as microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) have been widely applied to the dairy, food and beverage industry after the discovery of asymmetric membranes by Loeb and Souriragin in the early 1960’s. The potential of developing RO process as a concentration technique to remove water from fruit juices has been of interest to the fruit juice industry for about 30 years. The advantages of RO process over traditional evaporation are in lower thermal damage to product, increase in aroma retention, less energy consumption and lower equipment costs. One main disadvantage of RO has its inability to reach the concentration of standard products produced by evaporation because of high osmotic pressure limitation. Studies have shown that the final concentration of fruit juices is limited by membranes and equipment to about 25–30°Brix with the most efficient flux and solute recovery (Gadea, 1987; Medina & Garcia, 1988; Paulson, Wilson, & Spatz, 1985; Pepper, 1990).
Recently, technological advances related to the development of new membranes and improvements in process engineering have been proved to overcome this limitation. New membrane processes including membrane and osmotic distillation and integrated membrane processes might contribute to the improvement of concentrated fruit juice processing (Álvarez et al., 2000; Calabrò, Jiao, & Drioli, 1994; Cassano et al., 2003; Cuperus, 1998; Drioli, Calabrò, & Wu, 1987; Drioli, Jiao, & Calabrò, 1992; Girard & Fukumoto, 2000; Hogan, Canning, Peterson, Johnson, & Michaels, 1998; Jiao, Molinari, Calabrò, & Drioli, 1992; Petrotos & Lazarides, 2001; Vaillant et al., 2001). This paper will provide a review of the recent significant progress on membrane processes for concentrating fruit juices, including the use of reverse osmosis, direct osmosis concentration, membrane and osmotic distillation, and integrated membrane processes.
Section snippets
Performance of RO membranes
Fruit juice concentration by RO has been of interest to the fruit processing industry for about 30 years. The advantages of RO over traditional evaporation are in low thermal damage to product, reduction in energy consumption and lower capital investments (Merson, Paredes, & Hosaka, 1980), as the process is carried out at low temperatures and it does not involve phase change for water removal. The retention of juice constituents, especially flavors, and the permeate flux, regarding RO
Process fundamentals
Direct osmosis concentration (DOC) is another membrane process capable of concentrating fruit juice at low temperatures and low pressures, thereby maintaining original flavor and color characteristics of the fruit. The principle uses an osmotic agent (OA) solution to establish an osmotic pressure gradient across a semi-permeable membrane and thus remove water from a single strength fruit juice. An osmotic agent is generally a solid highly soluble in water, hygroscopic, non-toxic, inert toward
Process fundamentals
Membrane distillation is a relatively new membrane process in which two aqueous solutions, at different temperatures, are separated by a microporous hydrophobic membrane. In these conditions a net pure water flux from the warm side to the cold side occurs. The process takes place at atmospheric pressure and at temperature that may be much lower than the boiling point of the solutions. The driving force is the vapour pressure difference between the two solution–membrane interfaces due to the
Process fundamentals
Osmotic distillation is a recent membrane process (Lefebvre, 1988), also known as osmotic evaporation (Deblay, 1995), membrane evaporation, isothermal membrane distillation or gas membrane extraction which has been successfully applied to the concentration of liquid foods such as milk, fruit and vegetable juice, instant coffee and tea and various non-food aqueous solutions.
This technique can be used to extract selectively the water from aqueous solutions under atmospheric pressure and at room
Integrated membrane processes
The potential for concentrating fruit juice by integrated membrane processes, particularly for industrial production of high quality concentrated juices, appears today very attractive. Because fruit juices such as orange juice have high solids and pectin content, they create a very viscous stream when directly submitted to concentration by RO or OD, which results in a lower permeate flux. Also, using a single-stage RO system it cannot reach concentrations larger than 25–30°Brix due to higher
Conclusions
The potential advantages of membrane concentration techniques over conventional evaporation for concentrating fruit juice have been successfully demonstrated, including improved product quality, easily scaled up and lower energy consumption, but they are generally limited by the fouling and lack of longer durability of membranes. Although today fruit juice concentration by membranes may be more expensive than evaporation, with the enlargement of the world’s fruit juice market and the request of
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