Food and Beverage Industry: How to Specify Industrial Water Filtration Equipment in the Food Industry
Water filtration applications in a food and beverage facility
In a typical Food and Beverage facility there are many different water and process applications, each demanding its own specific level of water purity. The presence, flows, and purity of each of these streams are determined by the layout of the Food and Beverage plant, eg, canning, dry goods, soft drinks, brewery.
These may include:
- Well, surface or city water pretreatment
- Boiler water treatment
- condensate treatment
- Process water treatment
- Cleaning and sterilization service water
- Hygiene Services
- Wastewater disposal.
Regardless of the application, there is a good chance that some form of industrial water filtration will be required for the food and beverage application to function at maximum efficiency.
Definition of the types of water filtration systems
Water filtration options can be divided into two main categories, based on the filtration media used.
- granular and
- membrane.
Granular Water filtration has been used for many decades in the food and beverage industry and will be familiar to most. Examples of granular media filtration include sand filters; activated carbon filters to remove taste, odor and chlorine; anthracite filters; and fine garnet filters.
These types of filters can remove suspended particles up to 10 microns in diameter (1 micron = 10-6 meters). With the use of certain coagulating or flocculating polymers fed before these filters (fed as filter aids), some success has been observed in removing particles down to nearly 1 micron.
The space between the discrete particles of the filter media serve as the pores. Suspended solids trapped by these filters will collect at the top of the filter media bed or within the pores.
Membrane Water filtration uses membranes to remove suspended particles. Unlike granular filters, membranes are designed with pores and are capable of removing much smaller particles. The latest membrane filtration is reverse osmosis (RO), where dissolved solids (metal ions) can be removed. This is not really a filtration mechanism in the true sense of the words, since the semi-permeable membranes used in RO do not have pores. It is more properly considered as a demineralization mechanism.
Membrane water filtration is best characterized by the size range of the filterable particles, as follows:
- microfiltration (MF) May include deep wound or woven type cartridge filters, or true membrane filters. It can remove particles from around 0.1 micron to over 1 micron.
- Ultrafiltration (UF) It can remove particles from less than 0.01 microns to greater than 0.1 microns. It can remove some large molecular weight organic dissolved materials.
- nanofiltration (NORTH CAROLINA) It can remove particles from less than 0.001 microns down to 0.01 microns. It can remove organic compounds of lower molecular weight.
- EITHER It can remove particles from 0.0001 microns to 0.001 microns. It can also remove DISSOLVED IONIC SOLIDS.