Mathematical model of membrane module for solvent recovery from soybean oil miscella

Abstract

A mathematical model was developed to predict the performance of the solvent recovery process in vegetable oil extraction. It consists of a mathematical programming-oriented model for opti-mizing a biorefinery superstructure. Published exper-imental data was recompiled related to the PVDF-10SI membrane. For the case study, the mathematical model provides much more conservative design re-sults than when considering just punctual experi-mental data. To concentrate miscella from 25% wt to 38% wt of oil, the required membrane area for the mathematical model is 275.22 m2, while the design ac-cording to punctual experimental data results in a membrane area of 224.23 m2. Besides, the mathemat-ical model allows evaluating the separation perfor-mance of each intervening compound through their permeabilities. This is an important contribution since the results obtained using punctual experi-mental data are not accurate enough for membrane process design in oil desolventizing.