Recent developments of membrane ultrafiltration in the dairy industry.

The word “ultrafiltration” is now familiar to the world dairy industry where this membrane technique is continuously expanding in such a rate that some are claiming ultrafilter will be so common, in a dairy plant, as a separator or as a plate heat exchanger (Roy, 1978). Proposed at the end of the sixties for the treatment of whey (Fallick, 1969) and for the manufacture of cheese (Maubois et al., 1969), membrane ultrafiltration was used, last year, to our knowledge, for the daily treatment of 8 000 tons of whey, roughly 3% of the total world production and for the making of more than 60 000 tons of cheese. The membrane areas of UF units used in the dairy industry vary from 20 m2 to more than 400 m2.