Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Can anyone help me to separate suspended solids from a juice?

nishanth - 2-12-2015 at 06:19

Hi All,

I need a solution for my issue.

for a process, i am squeezing the shrimp shell waste and removing the water from it which gives a juice sort of liquid during the squeezing process.

this juice has about 5% of suspended solids in it, and I need to separate the suspended solids in from the water. I NEED THE SOLID PARTICLES ALONE AND I DONT NEED THE WATER.

for this i tried in lab centrifuge with 5000 rpm and it gave complete separation. based on this I bought a disc type centrifuge with 7200 rpm and installed it. now when i run it, the separation is not proper.

since this is meat particle, i am not able to do the separation using cloth medium. And separation with centrifugal force happens only with an rpm above 5000.

Suggest me any other method of doing it like adding coagulant or floculant or and other mechanical separation without altering the structural nature of the meat particle.

You can also mail me on nkumar@indfrag.com

Thanks in advance.

PHILOU Zrealone - 2-12-2015 at 07:16

You may use vaccuum filtration on a millipore filter (of suited pore size)

You may change the density of the fluid this will help the segregation of the particles vs the fluid in the centrifuge...
-If this is saline (like salty water) you may add demineralised water to reduce the overal density.
-If saline or not, you may add a water soluble solvent like aceton, methanol or ethanol this will depress the density by a lot and thus favor sedimentation.

You may work the other way arround and add more salt to increase the density of the fluid and the lighter particles will float on the surface...brine (saturated NaCl), NH4NO3, ... heavy salts solution used for geologic descrimination of minerals by density.

If the process is for continuous work up or industrial, and that you use an organic solvent, the recollection of it by distillation is a must for environmental and economical reasons; if you use salt addition; then for the same reasons cristallization might be necessary.

chemrox - 15-12-2015 at 20:24

@philo.. Chemistry is the interesting part of physics.

Sulaiman - 16-12-2015 at 00:42

Could evaporating off the water by vacuum be viable?

What is the particle size range ?