Three years after its start-up, OPTIMAL (OPTIMIzed Design of Membrane Processes for the Production of Dairy Ingredients) has come to an end.
This project had two main objectives :
- to collect and structure the knowledge of researchers, dairy manufacturers and equipment manufacturers
- to study and develop an approach to optimize the design and operation of 0.1 µm microfiltration of skim milk (MF) to obtain 2 fractions of value-added ingredients.
The optimization of the MF via evolutionary algorithms allowed to open the reflection on a new design of installations and new combinations of operating conditions. The result of the optimization is a proof of concept and a unit operation optimization software has been developed with our Track Advance teams.