Introduction of palm oil refining process - physical & chemical

Palm oil refining is adopted to deep process crude palm oil by removing impurities like gum, acid, pigment and bad smell. Palm oil refining can be divided into chemical refining and physical refining. We can provide different methods of refining according to the acid value of your palm crude oil.

Palm oil in different states

Generally speaking, the chemical and physical refining of palm oil requires degumming, deacidification, decolorization, and deodorization. The difference between the two methods lies in the deacidification process. The following is a brief description of the process of palm oil physical and chemical refining.

1. Degumming: We have two ways to remove the gum in the crude oil: by adding hot water or phosphoric acid, usually we adopt dry type degumming for crude palm oil since it doesn't contain much gum.

2. Deacidifaction/ Neutralization: This is the most important step to differentiate physical refining and chemical refining. Chemical type is to add alkali and neutralize with acid and generate soapstock, physical is to use high temperature steam to remove acid.

For capacity below 10tpd and raw material crude palm oil with FFA lower than 5%, you can choose chemical type as well, for higher capacity with high acid value, or your final oil market has high requirement for refined palm oil, then you can consider physical type.

3. Decolorization/ Bleaching: Whether it is physical or chemical refining, the method of decolorization is the same. Adding white clay or active carbon to absorb color, and we can control the quantity of white clay to make the oil color as you require.

4. Deodorization: In palm oil physical or chemical refining, we need to use steam to take bad smells away under vacuum state. There are double pipes during this section, one is for heating palm oil before deodorization, another is cooling pipe to lower the oil temperature and then pump the final oil to storage tank.

Small scale palm oil refining plant

If you have the plan to set up a palm oil refinery plant, please tell us what is the acid value of your crude palm oil and how many tons do you want to refine per day. According to your crude palm oil quality, we will decide to use physical or chemical refining process method and design a suitable project for you.