Decontamination of sugar syrup by pulsed light.
Résumé
The pulsed light produced by xenon flash lamps was applied to 65 to 67 uBrix sugar syrups artificially contaminated with suspensions of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and with spores of Bacillus subtilis, Geobacillus stearothermophilus, Alicyclobacillus acidoterrestris, and Aspergillus niger. The emitted pulsed light contained 18.5% UV radiation. At least 3-log reductions of S. cerevisiae, B. subtilis, G. stearothermophilus, and A. acidoterrestris suspended in 3-mm-deep volumes of sugar syrup were obtained with a fluence of the incident pulsed light equal to or less than 1.8 J/cm2, and the same results were obtained for B. subtilis and A. acidoterrestris suspended in 10-mm-deep volumes of sugar syrup. A. niger spores would require a more intense treatment; for instance, the maximal log reduction was close to 1 with a fluence of the incident pulsed light of 1.2 J/cm2. A flowthrough reactor with a flow rate of 320 ml/min and a flow gap of 2.15 mm was designed for pulsed light treatment of sugar syrup. Using this device, a 3-log reduction of A. acidoterrestris spores was obtained with 3 to 4 pulses of incident pulsed light at 0.91 J/cm2 per sugar syrup volume.