Dynamic modelling of milk ultrafiltration by artificial neural network

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used to dynamically model crossflow ultrafiltration of milk. It aims to predict permeate flux, total hydraulic resistance and the milk components rejection (protein, fat, lactose, ash and total solids) as a function of transmembrane pressure and processing time. Dynamic modelling of ultratiltration performance of colloidal systems (such as milk) is very important for designing of a new process and better understanding of the present process. Such processes show complex non-linear behaviour due to unknown interactions between compounds of a colloidal system, thus the theoretical approaches were not being able to successfully model the process. In this work, emphasis has been focused on intelligent selection of training data, using few training data points and small network. Also it has been tried to test the ANN ability to predict new data that may not be originally available. Two neural network models were constructed to predict the flux/total resistance and rejection during ultratiltration of milk. The results showed that there is an excellent agreement between the validation data (not used in training) and modelled data, with average errors less than 1%. Also the trained networks are able to accurately capture the non-linear dynamics of milk ultrafiltration even for a new condition that has not been used in the training process. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.