State-of-the-Art Facilities at ISU Center for Crops Utilization Research
The Center for Crops Utilization Research (CCUR) is home to some of the best laboratory, processing, and training facilities at Iowa State University. 14,000 square feet of pilot plant processing and support space is available for fermentation and product recovery (bench scale to thousand liter pilot scale), food processing (wet and dry), and industrial product development, CCUR provides companies access to our facility to bring their ideas to the next level.
The Center offers industrial fermentation technologies for small scale (2-L; 5-L; 10-L; 15-L and 30-L) fermentation optimization; pilot scale (500-L, 1000-L and 1,200-L) process development; and downstream process operations, including cell-liquid separation; cell lysis; membrane separation (MF, UF and NF); chromatography purification; pasteurization; and drying (spray drying, freeze drying, vacuum drying). A supercritical CO2 extractor is also available for oil/lipid-based compound extraction.
The Center provides food processing technologies for crops processing and conversion into food, feed, and bio renewables products including grinding, dehulling, solid-solid separation (aspiration, sieving); mixing; chemical/enzyme reactions; solid-liquid separation (filtration, centrifugation); evaporation; homogenization/emulsification; membrane filtration (MF, UF, NF and RO); chromatography separation; supercritical CO2 extraction; pasteurization (HTST/UHT); and drying technologies (spray drying, drum drying, vacuum drying, and freeze drying).
The Center offers extrusion technologies to study the feasibility and scale up trials of processing food ingredients into animal feeds, pet foods, breakfast cereals, snack foods, and vegetable protein-based meats.
The Center also offers analytical testing services to support quality control of the industrial fermentation, food processing and extrusion process development. We also offer a 500-square cold room (4oC) and a 400 square freeze room (-15oC) for materials storage. Powder with different voltages, compressed air, domestic cold/hot water, distiller water, cooling water, process steam and culinary steam are available and designed to allow for rapid rearrangement and modification of processing machinery and related equipment.
