New polymeric membrane nanofiltration for succinate recovery: a comparative study

Bio-based succinic acid recovery from fermentation broth has remained a challenge in the separation industry due the presence of by-products with similar physicochemical properties. In this work, the selective separation of succinate from succinate model solutions and the actual fermentation broth were investigated using newly fabricated polyimide P84 (PI) nanofiltration (NF) membrane and compared with three types of commercial pressure filtration membranes namely NF1, NF2 and NF270. Results show that PI membrane demonstrated comparable inorganic salt rejections performance as the commercial NF membranes of 86% and 99% for NaCl and Na₂SO₄, respectively. However PI shows much lower surface roughness, beneficial in reducing the fouling effect. PI also demonstrated equivalent performance for succinate permeation flux and retention at high concentration as the commercial membranes. PI exhibited high succinate retention (95%) in actual fermentation broth, equivalent to the commercial membranes (92–99%) and also higher selectivity factor (SF) < 0.14 compared to the NF1 membrane, SF < 0.19. Thus the PI membrane could give better succinate recovery against other carboxylates in the fermentation broth than the commercial membranes.