Detailed Overview of Palm Oil Processing Stages

Palm oil is a commonly used vegetable oil, and its production process involves several steps, generally divided into three stages: raw material preparation, pressing, and refining. Below is a detailed introduction to the palm oil production process and the facilities required.

Raw Material Preparation Stage:

•  Sterilization:

Freshly harvested palm fruits have high fatty acid content and spoil quickly. Sterilization destroys the lipase in the fruit pulp, preventing an increase in free fatty acids in the oil. There are two types of sterilization tanks: horizontal tanks, commonly used in large palm oil processing plants, and vertical tanks, which require more manual labor for unloading.

•  Stripping:

After sterilization, the palm fruits are cooled and stripped. Common stripping machines include drum-type strippers for large oil plants and simpler machines for small-scale processing.

•  Digestion:

Before pressing, the stripped palm fruits are digested to break down the cell walls, facilitating oil extraction and reducing machine clogging during pressing.

Pressing Stage:

•  The core step in palm oil processing, pressing typically uses single or double screw palm oil presses designed specifically for palm fruits.

Refining Stage:

•  Similar to other edible oils, palm oil refining includes degumming, deacidification, decolorization, and deodorization, using equipment such as alkali refining tanks, decolorization pots, deodorization pots, and filters. Due to the unique composition of palm oil, fractionation is also required to separate soft and hard fats, using equipment like oil heaters, crystallization tanks, and membrane filters.

Fractionation:

•  This process controls the cooling and crystallization of palm oil to separate it into low-melting liquid (soft fat) and high-melting solid (hard fat) phases, using equipment such as oil heaters, crystallization tanks, and membrane filters.

In summary, palm oil production requires advanced equipment and strict processes. The specific process steps and equipment configuration should be flexibly arranged according to the production conditions and market demands of the factory to ensure efficiency and quality improvement.Huatai Oil Machinery can provide large scale complete Palm Oil Production Line solutions with 1-120TPH capacity.