Membrane separations are widely used across a range of food and beverage industries, including dairy products; juiced fruit and various miscellaneous foods and food additives. The performance of a membrane processes deteriorate over time due to the deposition of unwanted fouling layers upon, or within, the membrane, causing declining permeate flux, increased operational cost, and shortened membrane life. Fluid dynamic gauging (FDG) is a technique based on fluid mechanical phenomena which provides measurements of thickness and strength of fouling layers, in situ and in real time. This paper demonstrates the application of FDG to monitor the performance of flat sheet polymeric membranes. Here, FDG is (i) used to generate profiles of discharge coefficient (Cd) against h/dt under different conditions to confirm its suitability for measuring cake thickness, (ii) augmented by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to prove it can be used to investigate the deformation characteristics of the cake layers. The successful implementation of FDG and CFD to provide in situ information such as permeate flux, thickness and strength of the cake layer opens up many possibilities for the elucidation and characterisation of membrane fouling and cleaning mechanisms.
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