Crude Palm Oil Processing Plant

Palm oil is derived from the fruit of oil palm tree, which is grown in tropical regions of Asia and Africa. Saturated fatty acid and unsaturated fatty acid account for about 50％ respectively, which endow the palm oil with better oxidative stability than other vegetable oils. Therefore, it is more suitable for frying and cooking.currently the palm oil is a kind of vegetable oil with the largest production, comsumption and international trade volume in the world.after refining and fractionation, we can get the palm oil with different melting points, which have wide applications in the catering industry, food industry and oil and chemical industry.

1. Harvesting – the Palm oil is extracted from palm fruits and these plants grow in the tropics usually in Africa. The fresh fruit bunch(FFB) is cut when the fruit is ripe and these fruit bunches are sent by trucks to the palm oil pressing plant.

2. Fruit Reception – the fruits arrived from the farm is dumped into a Fresh Fruit Bunch (FFB) hopper which is then transferred to fruit cages. The cages are then moved into a sterilizer.

3. Sterilization – the sterilizer acts as a pressure cooker where the fruits are heated with steam at a pressure of 45 psig for about one hour. This process softens the fruits enabling the separation of the fruit from bunches and stopping the enzymes that cause the increase of Free fatty acids (FFA)in the fruits.

4. Threshing – in the next stage, fruit cages are tipped and moved to a threshing machine using the conveyor belt . The bunches get lifted up and dropped when they reach the top of the drum. This action helps the detachment of fruits from the bunches and the separated fruit lets fall through the slots of the drum to a conveyor below.

5. Pressing – The fruits are moved to a digester which mashes up palm fruit so that the oil is extracted efficiently. The output from the screw press is press cake and crude palm oil. The extracted oil is mixed with fruit particles, water, sand and dirt and the press cake is the transferred to the depericarpper for further processing.