Plant CO2

SCF PLANT WITH CO2 SUPERCRITICAL AND WATER SUBCRITICAL

Chemical plants are often very manual machines. No automation, control is no software installed on board. This is not our point of view. The Torino area in Italy shows the concentration of other companies operating in the field of automation in Italy, one of the highest worldwide. We believe that automation is essential in the extraction plants with supercritical fluids. This is why we decided to implement a single software, installing it both in industrial installations in the research and development facilities. The software offers many options and pilot the PLC inside the main electrical panel. The Process Designer module allows the operator an expert to build step by step the specific process you want to accomplish. Temperature, pressure, flow, every detail is under software control. the meter of mass flow Coriolis technology, gives the instantaneous flow and the flow totalizer. The condenser, the cooler, the evaporator heat exchanger, all objects are controlled separately. Extractor, separator, storage tank are under his command. With the smartphone form, the whole system is in your hand, wherever you go.

PASTEURIZATION COLD

Separeco has developed a new application of fluids in the supercritical state regarding the pasteurization of liquid at low temperature (28-32 ° C) and high pressure (80 bar). The plant operates with carbon dioxide (CO2) in the supercritical state in continuous mode. The liquid is loaded into plastic containers for foods and then sucked by a metering pump and mixed with CO2 in supercritical conditions before entering the reactor. The reactor consists of a series of concentric tubes thermostated by a heat exchanger. The system allows an appropriate time to contact between the fluid carbon dioxide in supercritical state and from pasteurized liquid. At the end of the processing cycle, the liquid is degassed via a vacuum pump and stored in stainless steel containers previously sterilized. Results showed that the treatment of orange juice with CO2 at lower operating pressure (130 bar) and the amount of carbon dioxide (0.385 g CO2), in line with the reduction of costs for future operations on an industrial scale, capable guarantee excellent microbial inactivation, extend the fresh orange juice shelf life.

Liquid Nutritional Supplements Mesophilic (cfu / g)

bacterial load before pasteurization 1.470.000bacterial

load after pasteurization <10

Nutritional and antioxidant properties of the blood orange juice treated with CO2 remained virtually unchanged until the 20th day of refrigerated storage, thus showing a slight decrease, not relevant to the maintenance of the antioxidant product. In addition, the sensory evaluation of the product by a trained panel suggested that the blood orange juice treated with CO2 would be well received by consumers and also, that it should be considered better before the 30 days of storage in a refrigerator at 4 ± 1 ° C. This suggests the great potential of the blood orange juice treated with CO2 as a new product to be allocated to the market for fresh fruit juices in a new retail facility, that the fresh fruit juices with 30 days of shelf-life.

MULTIPURPOSE SYSTEM

It 'was released a new multipurpose facility SFE / SFF / SFP with 6 liter extractor, fractionation tower 4.5 meters and 1.2-liter reactor pasteurization. The plant is equipped with PLC and special software that displays all variables measured by flow sensors (jointed to coriolis effect) they are connected to the inverter to control pump speed, engine temperature (fast thermocouple class 1) and pressure (metal-to-metal type). To control the pressure actuated valves we adopted the compressed air, very precise, controlled by a second pre-control valve, full current of the intermediate-pressure feedback control.

It has also been provided for shutting valves to change proportional to the control of the temperature regulating fluid. The proportional automatic valves and on / off high pressure are driven by compressed air.

The ability to automatically control the process is critical for the purposes of research because it allows to easily determine the kinetics of extraction and the parameters required for dissolution of the active ingredient required. The graphs produced by the system can be exported and glued on word document. The electrical system is housed in a cabilet on the side of the Machines.

The electrical panel is compact and contains all trasdduttori forms of temperature sensors, flow and pressure. Below are visible inverters for the control of the engine revolutions.

In the central part it is visible the PLC with all the in-out connections for the actuators and the control valves. A network hob allows multiple PCs connected to the system either directly or through the Internet with secure connection (VPN).

R&D SYSTEM

Separeco produces 2 to 200 liters pilot plants. The utilization of a pilot plant allows to obtain good quality extracts and/or refined products on which it is possible to perform a wide range of tests, including evaluation panels. With plants having at least 5 liters volume it is possible to produce small series of samples for commercial feasibility evaluation.The configuration as flexible as possible. It starts with the smallest 2 liters model SCF200 up to the 10 liters model SCF1000.

The specifications are:

- Operation pressure between 300 and 600 bar;

- CO2 pump flow rate between 36 and 300 Kg/h;

- Tower/pasteurization reactor feeding pump flow rate between 2 and 7 Kg/h;

- Extractor volume between 2 and 200 liters;

- Rapid closures without locknut and bolts;

- Multiple separators configuration;

- 2.5 to 7 meters high fractionation column with structured filling bodies;

- 1.5 to 25 liters continuous pasteurizer;

- Chiller provided complementary;

- Heater provided complementary.

The sizes are very restrained. The 5 liters model SCF500 measures 280 cm x 160 cm, and it is 220 cm high, excluding the fractionation tower. We can provide it in several versions, manual ones and PLC assisted ones, supervised by a PC with total control on the process and video graphs generation. The model SCF500 (but this applies to each model, from SCF200 to SCF1000) is configurable as follows:

SCF500 series 1, extraction;
SCF500 series 2, extraction1 and fractionation;
SCF500 series 3, extraction1 and pasteurization;
SCF500 series 4, extraction1, fractionation e pasteurization;
SCF500 series 5, extraction1, fractionation, pasteurization e micronization;
SCF500 series 9, customizable upon request.

Note 1: available with high pressure water extraction stage and/or with co-solvent feeding system.All plants can be provided in three different versions:

MP: with PTFE double membrane pumps (max 380 bar);
HP: with metallic membrane pumps (max 500 bar);
UP: with double metallic membrane pumps (max 680 bar).

Each model can be chosen to be manual or PLC and PC assisted with the MES control software, able to produce temporal graphs in relation to all the process variables. Moreover it is possible to configure the exercise pressure between 300 and 600 bar. The initial investment is never lost: our plants are scalable! It is always possible to upgrade from series 1 to series 2 and so on, up to series 5. Separeco pay the maximum attention in the components choice for the realization of their plants, utilizing components produced by the best brands on the market. Stainless steel for the skid, Autoclave Engineers valves, Lewa membrane pumps, Swagelok high pressure bridges, Parker pneumatic valves. All our plants are realized according to the European PED (Pressure Equipment Directive) legislation, labeled CE and with all the relevant certifications.

The operative and kinetic results obtained from the experimentation on pilot plants were proven to be adequate and reliable for a proper scale-up and sizing the industrial plant basing on the productive needs. Our experience lead us to build plants having 4 parallel 300 liters extractors, some of those meant for the Chinese market.The choice to utilize this configuration type was dictated by the possibility of being able to endow the system of more flexibility, hence to utilize one or more extractors according to the productive necessities. Moreover, the utilization of several extractors favors the economic handling efficiency and the lowering of the loading and unloading dead times. In fact, the utilization of several extractors in parallel allows the reduction of CO2 losses due to the depressurization, and through a compressor it is possible to compress the residual CO2, so that every loss is eliminated.

Plant specifications:

Operation pressure up to 380 bar;
Two or more extractors having volumes between 100 and 800 liters each;
CO2 pump flow rate between 500 and 5000 Kh/h;
PLC system and MES software for automatisms and alarms management;
Servo assisted opening system;
Automatic collection system;
Total CO2 recovery.

PILOT SYSTEM

Separeco have decided to realize research plants with a minimum volume of 1 liter. This policy arises from the decennial experience matured in the engineering and set up of supercritical CO2 processes. The reasons of this choice is due to the following reasons:

- The percentage of the active principles to extract is often lower than 10% of the dry weight. Considering that flours have a filling index of the basket around 0,5, with a 100-200 ml volume the yield is few drops of extract, often insufficient for a complete testing.

- Extraction kinetics generally are not scalable for volumes lower than 1 liter.

- Plants with an extractor smaller than 1 liter are not provided of a CO2 condenser. This means that CO2 is not recovered during the cycle. In our plants CO2 is totally recovered during the cycle.

- In plants with extractors smaller than 1 liter it is difficult to perform extraction with high pressure water for polar substances.

- Pumps are so small that it would be impossible to feed a fractionation tower.

In our research plants the extractor gross volume is about 1000 ml, whereas the basket containing the matrix t treat has total useful volume of 800 ml. The closings are “Rapid”, with no locknut nor bolts. The Separeco research plant, model SCF100, has very restrained size, 120 cm x 140 cm. It has a low energy consumption and low amperage, thanks to the utilization of threephase electric equipment. We can provide it in several versions, manual ones and PLC assisted ones, supervised by a PC with total control on the process and video graphs generation.

The model SCF100 is configurable as follows:

- SCF100 series 1, extraction

- SCF100 series 2, estrazione1 e fractionation

- SCF100 series 3, estrazione1 e pasteurization

- SCF100 series 4, estrazione1, fractionation e pasteurization

- SCF100 series 5, estrazione1, fractionation, pasteurization e micronization.

- SCF100 series 9, customizable upon request

Note 1: available with high pressure water extraction stage and/or with co-solvent feeding system.

All plants can be provided in three different versions: