PALM OIL EXTRACTION PROCESS

PALM OIL EXTRACTION PROCESS
Before going into the technologies involved in the process of producing palm oil, we will examine the processes involved. After harvesting the fruits in the groves or plantation, the fruit bunches are moved to the mill. Here the fresh fruit bunches FFBs are weighed, and then quartered before they are transferred to the sterilization unit where they are cooked. After sterilization the next step is stripping and threshing to separate the fruits from the husks or spent bunches (SFBs). The husks are then discarded and later used as fuel for firing the furnaces that power the sterilizer.
The separated fruits are then transferred to the digester where the cooked fruits separated from the husks are mashed into a pulp. Hereafter the mash is transferred to the press from where the crude red palm oil is squeezed out and transferred into a clarifier for sedimentation.
The residue after digestion is a mixture of fiber and palm kernel nuts. This mixture is sent to a nut recovery system where the nuts are separated from the fiber. The nuts are dried and cracked to produce palm kernels.
The palm kernels are processed to produce palm kernel oil.
Companies which produce the technology for both red palm oil and palm kernel oil extraction are
1 Nigerian Institute For Oil Palm Research (NIFOR) in Benin City
2 WACAPOL in England
3 BASICON in Owerri, Nigeria
To name three which are known to me.
THE TECHNOLOGIES FOR PRODUCING PALM OIL
The technologies for producing palm oil do not differ significantly from each other. They are all based on cooking, pounding and pressing process which my grandmother used in her own time which I witnessed. The significant changes are
1 Using steam to cook the fruits either under atmospheric pressure or under high pressure
2 The motorization of the digestion and pressing stages
3 The use of a continuous rather than a batch process
4 Sterilization of the whole bunch rather than winnowed fruits.
The production of palm kernel oil will