Application of membrane technology in pectin extraction

Pectin is a natural high-molecular substance composed of galacturonic acid. It can be made from the peel or pomace of fruits such as grapefruit, lemon, citrus, apple, and other appropriate edible plants. It is mainly used as a gelling agent, thickener and stabilizer in the food industry, and has gelling, emulsifying and stabilizing effects.

In addition, pectin is also an indispensable auxiliary material in the pharmaceutical industry. It has obvious effects on lowering blood sugar, blood lipids, reducing cholesterol, unblocking blood vessels, and treating diabetes, hypertension, constipation, and relieving lead poisoning.

How to better extract pectin and improve the quality of pectin? It has always been a concern of the industry.

In pectin production, the commonly used refining method is alcohol precipitation, and the commonly used concentration methods are multi-effect concentration, decompression vacuum concentration, etc.

In the traditional production process, due to the large amount of extract, a large amount of steam is consumed during the concentration process, resulting in high production costs for enterprises.

At the same time, since there is no impurity removal process during the heat concentration process, impurities in the extract, especially small molecule impurities and inorganic salts, will increase, thus affecting the quality of the product. In the alcohol precipitation process, since the extract contains a large amount of impurities, the impurity content in the ethanol is high and the heat recovery loss is large.

The membrane separation technology is used to extract pectin. No heating is required during the treatment process, which effectively prevents the destruction of the activity of heat-sensitive substances. It is a pure physical process with no phase change and no alcohol precipitation. On the basis of saving a lot of production costs, the pectin product ingredients are closer to natural quality, green and environmentally friendly, and fully meet high-end needs such as product exports. Compared with vacuum concentration, membrane separation technology has low energy consumption, strong selectivity, can remove small molecules such as pigments in pectin extracts, improve the quality of pectin, and is more cost-saving and reliable than traditional methods.