My observations are that fouling mainly happens in situations where your flow is slow or non existent. So for instance, if you leave concentrated tincture in the system overnight just sitting, there will be a decline in performance once you turn it on again the next day. Fortunately, I’ve also found this to be pretty reversable through just rinsing clean solvent through it with low pressure and high speed. To best avoid fouling:
Always leave your membranes on clean solvent at the end of the day – don’t leave them sitting in gunk.
Run the recommended crossflow rates, don’t skimp with too weak of a pump (for instance, the pumps provided by sterlitech are too small for most brands at the size they’re supposed to run)
Fouling happens when you don’t properly maintenence your skid or you have too many undissolved solids in your repentate
We require maintenance logs or it voids your warranty
When someone has a problem the first thing we do is look at the maintenance logs, if there hasn’t been maintenance lately we know why fouling is occurring
We can actually test degradation / fouling on our membanes with a conductivity test
