Thin-film separation protects heat-sensitive food products

Artisan’s thin/wiped-film short-residence-time technology is ideally suited for heat sensitive and viscous food products that foul, foam or contain solids. Thin-film technology will not degrade or denature proteins like wiped-film evaporators with high shear forces. And our rugged equipment can process materials with viscosities up to 1 million centipoise.

Using our innovative separation solutions, Artisan has helped the world’s leading food companies create new products or improve existing ones. We’ve helped our customers take products from development through full production, improving both productivity and profitability along the way.

Our engineers work with your product development team to solve your tough separation problems. We have decades of experience working with foods, beverages, flavors, additives, nutraceuticals and edible oils. Our experience includes concentrating, desolventizing, drying, recovering, and deodorizing.

Artisan’s extensive experience includes the following food processing applications:

Concentrating beverages to higher levels than conventional evaporators

Problem

Concentrating coffee, tea, and other solids-containing liquids poses severe operating challenges to the beverage industry. Typically, applied conventional technologies, such as multiple effect, falling film, or forced circulation evaporation, yield mixed results depending on the particular application, and the degree of solids concentration. These problems generally stem from the material’s heat and shear sensitivity, and its foaming and fouling characteristics.

Solution

Use the Artisan Rototherm^® mechanically aided thin-film evaporator to overcome these problems, and concentrate, in a single pass, a variety of beverages to solids contents. Rototherm’s ability to concentrate from a dilute feed to very high solids content, without product degradation, makes it the most versatile processor in the industry. The combination of short residence time, highly turbulent film, and a robust design, enables uninterrupted operation. Due to its horizontal design and close rotor clearance, CIP is generally accomplished by running a few liters of suitable cleaning solution through the machine for several minutes, drastically reducing consumption and waste.

Examples

• Concentrating coffee to greater than 70% solids, in a single step, achieving a consistently high-quality concentrate.
• Concentrating caffeine from a wet solvent-rich solution to a dry powder, with less than 100 PPM residual solvent in a single step.
• Concentrating tea from a dilute solution

  Continuous vacuum concentration of tea from 15% solids to greater than 50% solids in a single pass, without product degradation. Concentration is carried out at 300 Torr and 170 °F.

Aroma recovery

Problem

Recovering valuable flavors and aromas from beverages is typically accomplished by steam stripping under vacuum to preserve the volatile flavors. For most applications, such as in coffee or tea processing, it is more desirable to recover the flavor/aroma compounds directly from the raw material (slurry) as opposed to the extract (liquid). This will dramatically improve the yield and enables substitution of expensive flavor additives from processors own material. However, current technologies such as wiped film evaporators, and other mechanically driven rotary type devices have many disadvantages.

Solution

The Artisan Evaporator/Stripper™ is the only “multistaged non-mechanical” thin-film processor capable of stripping valuable flavors/aromas directly from a slurry. The Evaporator/Stripper not only costs considerably less than the competing technologies to install and operate, it offers additional features & benefits.

Examples

Recovering flavors/aromas from fruit and vegetable juices or purees, dairy products, alcoholic beverages, hot beverages such as coffee and tea, botanicals, herbs and spices, and citrus by-products.

Purifying natural flavors & extracts

Problem

Purification of high value, heat sensitive, viscous, solids containing, foaming, and/or fouling aqueous and organic products poses tremendous challenges to the process engineer, especially when extremely low residual contaminant levels are required without the loss of valuable ingredients. This is particularly applicable to thermally sensitive materials, such as plant extracts, where exposure to process temperatures must be minimized to prevent product degradation.

Solution

Use the Artisan proprietary “mechanically agitated thin-film evaporator” with fractionating column to purify and concentrate your product. Strip the undesirable contaminants to non-detectable levels with no loss of valuable aroma/flavor compounds. The highly turbulent film, extremely short residence time, and rapid surface renewal make Rototherm^® the most suitable evaporator/concentrator for your difficult purification problems.

Examples

• Concentrate and purify nut flavor extract from a mixture containing dissolved solids (product), alcohol, water, propylene glycol, and 20 PPM contaminant. The contaminant is reduced to 10 PPB, while concentrating the extract by six (6) fold.
• Purify orange peel oil by removing a variety of pesticides to less than a combined 1 PPM by evaporating D-Limonene in Rototherm.
• Concentrate citrus oil by evaporating D-Limonene in a Rototherm with a fractionating column to concentrate Decanal, while minimizing product carry-over. Due to the short residence in the Rototherm, product color and quality is superior to those concentrated by batch distillation.

©2012 Artisan Industries Inc. Waltham MA, U.S.A. • phone 781.893.6800 • fax 781.647.0143