Plate and Frame filtration without DE filter aid

[dleong]

Hello everybody I currently work at Anchor Brewing Company as an Associate Process Engineer and I'm looking at ways to improve our filtration process. I am talking to vendors and researching on ways to reduce our of DE usage since we use a combination of Celite Cynergy, Hyflo Z or C3Z, Pall K250 filter sheets, and PVPP. Has anybody had success using primarily filter sheets (we would need to change the grade of our filter sheets) as the final filtering media? We currently centrifuge from our CST and then inject a slurry of PVPP and DE before our plate and frame filtration.

We typically filter anywhere from 500-900 barrels a day, so with the long runs we definitely have to add plates to our 40 plate and frame to increase our capacity to compensate for not using DE to "sieve" the proteins.

Any information would be greatly appreciated and I'm happy to answer any other questions that I have addressed (I'm sure there are many things I left out that need to be known)

[dick murton]

I think simple sheet filtration would not work for this size of filtration run, especially as you will need to filter out the PVPP. Either stick to KG filters, or move to cross flow filters.

The Norit / Pentair system does not use a CF before it as an integral part of the process, whereas the Westfalia/Pall system does. You should get decent length runs out of the Norit/Pentair system - far better than without centrifugation. Not sure if Westfalia/Pall will let you do a system without the dedicated high speed CF, but you should still get decent runs. Both are extremely hands off compared to KG filters, and can be sized to suit your throughput, with easy capacity increase by adding more filter modules.

We didn't do highly late hopped beers in our pilot trials, but there was virtually no difference in palate & aroma in the ones we did do. If you want to you could use a regenerative PVPP system after the cross flow.

I believe Alfa Laval, and possibly Filtrox have similar systems, but have never used them. (Filtrox definitely used to have beer recovery from yeast systems)