Evaporation and crystallization technologies are commonly used in food and fermentation industries to concentrate the feed or recover targeted products. Novasep has acquired recognized expertise in providing evaporation and crystallization solutions with a strong focus on:
- Productivity to produce the right amount at the right quality
- CAPEX vs OPEX balance compliant with your strategic choices and local cost contraints
- Low energy consumption to minimize operational expenses and accelerate your return-on-investment
Technologies
Several industrial solutions are currently available and can be designed according to your product and process:
Falling film evaporators
This technology presents good thermic transfer while consuming less energy and being easy to clean. It is well adapted for applications such as the concentration of vinasses, lactic acid, and betaine.
Forced circulation evaporators
This technology is adapted to viscous or fouling products and crystals. It is often used for wheat stillage concentration, the treatment of demineralization effluent, or for crystallization.
Plate evaporators
This technical solution is very compact for an excellent heat transfer. The plate evaporators are adapted to produce lactose, glucose syrup, galactose or fructose syrup.
Other technologies can be considered if adapted, including: stirrer evaporator, rising film evaporator, fluidized bed evaporator, and spiral tube evaporator.
Thermal organization
In addition to the equipment itself, the thermal organization has a great impact on process economics and allows the process to be adapted to the user’s CAPEX/OPEX strategy:
Single effect organization: adapted to very low capacity or at the very end of the process as a finisher.
Multiple effect evaporation: the heating fluid is used multiple times to optimize the calorie valorization across the evaporation/crystallization process. It significantly reduces steam and cooling water consumption.
Thermal Vapour Recompression (TVR): the TVR allows the partial recycling of vapors within the steam flow to reduce steam consumption.
Mechanical vapour recompression (MVR): the MVR technology is able to recompress and re-inject the vapor generated by evaporation at a higher temperature. This thermal organization does not require steam and can be combined either with multiple effect organization or several recompression stations.
Industrial solutions for crystallization are very similar and include draft tube baffle systems, forced circulation crystallization, etc. with similar options for thermal organization (Multiple-effect, MVR and TVR).
According to your need or challenge, we can support you thanks to a proven process development methodology.
These technologies are typically used for the:
- Concentration of the feed before specific chromatography units
- Concentration of chromatographic fractions
- Concentration of glucose and fructose syrups
- Crystallization of sugar, API, organic acids, dextrose, etc.
- Concentration of effluents (brines, molasses, vinasses, raffinate, etc.)
