Advantages of the FRINGS Cross-flow process


The success of the FRINGS filtration technology is due to many years experience and innovative ideas. Our technology aims to give fresh impetus to filtration.

The FRINGS technology provides:

• Continuous operation 
• Minimized loss of product
• Reduced consumption of auxiliary filter material
• High user-friendliness thanks to semi-automatic operation
• Reduction of energy and personnel costs
• Implementation of all necessary safety features 
• Safe cut-off of micro-organisms (defined cut-off)

Vinegar filtration

Experience shows that some kinds of vinegars are in general easy to filter. Others, however, such as spirit vinegar, or mixtures of wine and spirit vinegar with high extract content, frequently create serious problems - although they seem easy to filter.
Vinegar producers are aware of this. They know that the physical-biological reasons for filtration difficulties are hard to identify. Not only do problems occur when a special raw material is used, but they also depend on the composition of the process water used (filtration of spirit vinegar) and on process management. The following list contains a number of factors that may hamper filtration capacity:

• Type and quality of nutrients
• Foam development during fermentation
• Troubled fermentations with lysated cells or with cells that are protected by a pectin mucous layer
• Age and maturity of vinegar
• Was the raw vinegar pre-treated before filtration? If yes, which method was used?
  

FRINGS plant concept

The plant concept is implemented to make sure that the modules are operated at their optimum operating point. A complete filtration plant consists of a CIP unit, a filter unit and a pre-filtration unit with circulation tank (Fig. 4).

Depending on the customer’s needs and requirements, the filter components can be put together according to the modular design principle, or as a turnkey cross-flow filtration plant.

All filter functions are controlled by a simple control system. This control system is freely programmable; therefore, our filtration plants can be easily integrated into existing vinegar production plants.



Plant design

The core components of a filtration plant are several capillary filtration modules installed in series (see figures 4 and 5), which can be customized according to the special case of application.