Abstract
Microfiltration is widely used to remove microbial cells from the fermentation broth in the downstream processing of biotechnological products and from the mixed liquor in MBR system. Since the filtration behaviors are strongly affected by the properties of the microbial cell cake formed on the surface of the membrane, knowledge of the cake structure provides valuable information for the design and operation of filter equipment. Various approaches have been made on dead–end microfiltration of microbial suspension to examine the filtration characteristics, and it has been clarified that many kinds of microbial cakes exhibit high compressibility. In this article, the analysis of microfiltration behaviors of microbial suspensions based on the compressible cake filtration model is discussed.
