PROTEIN RECOVERY FROM WHEY BY COACERVATION USING CARBOXYMETHYLCELLULOSE: SCALING FROM LABORATORY TO PILOT

Whey is the liquid by-product from cheese production. It contains a set of proteins, along with water, lactose, lipids, and mineral salts. It is an effluent from the cheese industry that is difficult and costly to treat, and efforts to revalorize. The objective of the work is the recovery of whey proteins by coacervation and its scaling. Coacervation is a technique to recover proteins with ionizable polysaccharides. The results show that it is possible to scale the process from 1 to 250 liters with a protein recovery close to 90 %. Despite increasing variability in some assays and incorporating minor modifications, the coacervation system proved to be scalable without significantly compromising protein recovery efficiency. The viability of the method and its scaling are confirmed, offering an economical alternative compared to membrane technology