Sunflower Protein Precipitation in a Tubular Precipitator

Abstract

Isoelectric precipitation of sunflower protein was carried out in a 20 m long, 6 mm internal diameter glass tubular precipitator. Effects of feed flow rate, protein concentration in the feed stream, and mean residence time on particle size distribution (PSD) were studied. The population balance equation (PBE) for the tubular precipitator was solved using the orthogonal collocation multiple shooting method. A simulated annealing method was used to determine the precipitation kinetic parameters for the nucleation rate, growth rate, aggregation rate, and breakage rate from the experimental data. Due to the lack of experimental data on the kinetics of sunflower protein precipitation in the literature, the extracted kinetics from our experiments were used to evaluate the predictive capability of the present model for experiments whose results had not been used to derive the kinetics. The model predictions of the particle size distribution along the tubular precipitator showed better agreement with the experimental data for large particles in comparison to the small particles (< 10 μm).