Separation process
AssigneeDuPont Nutritional Biosciences APS
InventorsHeikki Heikkila, Hannu Koivikko, Jari Lewandowski, Mika Manttari, Jari Mattila
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Abstract
The invention relates to an improved nanofiltration process for separating and recovering components, such as sugars and sugar alcohols from multicomponent mixtures. The process of the invention is characterized by collecting the nanofiltration retentate/permeate in several fractions with different purity, optional recycling of at least one of the collected nanofiltration retentate/permeate fractions to the nanofiltration and recovering the desired component from the nanofiltration permeate/retentate fractions by different methods. In one embodiment of the invention, the process comprises a combination of nanofiltration and chromatography.
Claims42
A process for separating and recovering at least one monosaccharide sugar from a solution containing said at least one monosaccharide sugar, comprising:
- (i) nanofiltering the solution to obtain a nanofiltration permeate and a nanofiltration retentate, whereby said at least one monosaccharide sugar is enriched in the nanofiltration permeate, and
- (ii) collecting the nanofiltration permeate in more than one fraction to obtain more than one permeate fraction where the relative difference between the contents of said at least one monosaccharide sugar in one collected nanofiltration permeate fraction, relative to the content of said at least one monosaccharide sugar in another collected permeate fraction, is more than 10%, on the dry solids (DS) basis, and
- (iii) recovering said at least one monosaccharide sugar from at least one of the collected nanofiltration permeate fractions by crystallization and subjecting at least one of the other collected nanofiltration permeate fractions to a precipitation crystallization, chromatographic fractionation or recycling to the nanofiltration.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.