Palm Oil Pressing Process
Palm oil pressing process
The fruit of oil palm is a key part of the production of palm oil. It grows on the fresh fruit bunch (FFB) of the oil palm tree. An oil palm tree can produce about 12 fresh fruit bunches a year. Each fresh fruit bunch It weighs about 20-30Kg and contains more than 1500-2000 oil palm fruits, which are mainly picked manually. A single oil palm fruit is 4-5 cm long, 3 cm in diameter, and weighs about 10 g. The fruit is ovoid or obovoid. The ripe fruit shows an attractive ruby red color and looks like a bright red date. Split the oil palm fruit into two, and you can see that there is a dark brown hard endocarp under the orange flesh, and inside the peel is a white seed kernel, the Palm Kernel. The orange pulp and white kernel are the sources of the two most famous products of oil palm: palm oil and palm kernel oil. All FFB harvested in plantations are required to be delivered to the factory within 24 hours. Doing so can improve the yield and quality of crude palm oil (CPO). . The quality of crude palm oil depends on the integrity of the palm fruit bunches. Once the palm fruit is damaged, it will deteriorate quickly, thus affecting the quality of crude palm oil.
Pressing process:
FFB-cleaning-high temperature Sterilize-fruit Removal
-mashing-pressing-filtration-clarification-dehydration-crude oil
1. High-temperature Sterilize: After cleaning the palm fruit bunches received from the palm orchard, they are first transported into the sterilization tank for sterilization. The specific process of sterilization is to use steam to cook the palm fruit bunches at high temperature in a sterilization tank for 90-120 minutes to destroy the lipase in the pulp to prevent the free fatty acid content in the oil from increasing. Makes palm fruits soft and easy to remove.
2. Fruit threshing: The fruit kernels of oil palm account for about 60% of the entire fruit bunch. The purpose of threshing is to separate the oil palm fruits from the fruit bunch. Mechanical threshing often uses a drum thresher. This kind of thresher has a long horizontal drum inside. There is a small channel or T-shaped knife plate in the drum. The speed is 20~25r/min. The drum basket of the thresher is equipped with a lightweight beater. When the drum rotates, , the oil palm fruit bunches first move upward, and then fall down under the action of gravity. In this way, the oil palm fruits vibrate off the fruit bunches and continue to flip along the drum until they are discharged.
3. Mash: The function of mashing is to destroy the fibrous tissue of the palm pulp, making it easier to squeeze and produce oil. The equipment used for mashing is a vertical mashing tank with a steam coil inside. The outer layer is insulated and the inner layer is steam mashed. The principle is to use steam to temper. The mashed palm pulp can be directly fed into the pressing equipment for pressing.
4. Pressing: The purpose of pressing is to produce palm oil from the palm fruit through the mechanical extrusion of the palm oil press. After pressing, a mixture of crude palm oil, fiber and core containing impurities can be obtained. The crude palm oil is stored in a thermally insulated storage tank, and the crude palm oil is diluted with steam to heat water so that it can better enter the vibrating filter screen.
5. Vibration filtration: Perform preliminary filtration to filter out the remaining fibers in the oil.
6. Clarification: The purpose of oil clarification is to remove various impurities in crude palm oil and improve the quality of palm oil.
7. Dehydration: The purpose is to remove the moisture in the crude palm oil to ensure that the acid value of the crude palm oil is stable and not easy to deteriorate. During vacuum drying, the clarified palm oil is passed into the vacuum drying system, and the water is evaporated and separated under stirring. The dried palm oil can be pumped into temporary storage tanks and then sold directly or further processed as needed.
