Progressive freeze concentration

Summary

Several technologies are available for liquid concentration in the food industry, the most common being evaporation. However, evaporation processes can cause product degradation and have high energy consumption. Freeze concentration provides an alternative, which separates water by freezing, while maintaining high product quality and uses intrinsically less energy. The aim of progressive freeze concentration is to provide a simpler mechanism to separate the ice from the concentrate and to reduce the required energy for concentration. In this thesis the process of progressive freeze concentration is modelled and scaled up from a lab-scale set-up to a pilot-scale machine.