A CAPE tool to simulate the pervaporation process for recovering an aroma contributor of orange juice

Flavor and odor components of foods are often lost during processing, which leads to a final product with poorer quality when compared to fresh made ingredients. It is not a different scenario in orange juice and other beverage industries. Heating processes cause severe physical and chemical losses of the natural characteristic flavour of orange juice. Methods, that use lower heat, present thermal damage reduction and must be investigated to establish parameters to the future commercial processes. Membrane separation processes can be considered a promising alternative for this challenge in orange juice manufacturing and aroma processing. Comparative study of quantitative data of volatiles to odor threshold data suggested Ethyl Butyrate (EB) is one of the key contributors to fresh orange aroma. The recovery of the key contributors as EB before evaporation or pasteurization steps creates quality improvement opportunities. The freshness of juice can be improved with enriched aroma fraction add back or even commercialized this folded fraction. Pervaporation is an attractive technology for thermal sensitive products. This process is based on a selective transport through a membrane associated with permeate evaporation on the downstream side of the membrane. The liquid feed mixture is maintained in contact with one side of a membrane and the permeate is continuously and selectively removed from the other side in vapor phase by a vacuum pump. Pervaporation process using a poly (dimethylsiloxane) membrane was simulated for understanding separation and recovery of EB from a binary mixture (EB-water). It was applied a Fortran simulator named PERVAP. The software allowed the calculation of selectivity and permeate flux. PERVAP assumes that the permeation flow is a function of the diffusion coefficient of penetrant components in the membrane . The diffusion coefficient was predicted considering the free-volume theory and assumed constant in the membrane. Equations proposed were validated against literature experimental data for EB-water mixture. .