Sadaf Soleimanisavadkouhi, a second year Bio-Process Engineering trainee, is currently working on her Individual Design Project at DSM, specifically on their PoFu (proteins of future) project.
DSM, one of the pioneer companies in downstream processing and resource recovery, aims to extract valuable proteins from rapeseed cake obtained as a byproduct from rapeseed oil production. The desired components are extracted from the pre-treated rapeseed cake. Ultrafiltration (UF) and diafiltration, both important forms of Tangential Flow Filtration (TFF), are used to have recoveries of desired concentration, yield and purity. The final step is a drying pro-cess. In diafiltration, water is used to wash out the impurities through the membrane.
Sadaf is expected to model protein concentration/diafiltration using tools such as MS Excel and MATLAB, to predict and translate the performance of a batch UF process into a continuous process.