Comparative study of crossflow microfiltration with conventional filtration of sherry wines Original Research Article

The present work reports, firstly, on the application of the gel-polarisation model to the crossflow microfiltration of sherry wines and brandies, in order to calculate the model parameters. In a preliminary set of experiments, the influence of the transmembrane pressure (TP) on the filtrate flow was studied, at several feed flows. The obtained results show a constant ratio between the optimum TP (TPopt) and the feed flow of 32×10−4 l h−1 Pa with a TPopt of 11×104 Pa, for a feed flow of 360 l h−1 for all products. The obtained values of D for the different products can indicate that the average size of the particles in the gel layer is from 10 to 50 nm. Secondly, it has compared crossflow microfiltration process with classic filtration processes, which are used in the standard production system. The results show that the microfiltration has a higher effectiveness than conventional filtration, except in the case of brandy, where conventional filtration is more effective.