What are the parts of the edible oil refinery plant?

Edible oil refining is a edible oil processing method that is to improve the quality of crude vegetable oil. In the edible oil refining process, it will remove solid impurities, free fatty acids, phospholipids, colloid, wax, odor, etc. contained in crude vegetable oil. So a complete fully continuous edible oil refining plant includes the following parts to finish the whole refining process: pretreatment part, degumming part, deacidification part, decolorization part, decolorization filtration part, deodorization part, heat conductive oil system, outdoor tanks area, etc.

1. Pretreatment part

Firstly, the pumped oil into the bag filter to ensure the effect of refining and to prevent damage to the refining equipment. Secondly, through the energy-saving heat exchanger for indirect heating of the oil, using the deodorized oil and crude oil to get the effects of exchanging heat, which can save part of the heating energy consumption.

2. Degumming part

The heated crude oil and phosphoric acid will be pumped from the phosphoric acid tank into the phosphoric acid mixer, and then the mixture of phosphoric acid and oil will be passed into the phosphoric acid reaction tank for degumming, which is equipped with stirring fins to achieve the best results. After degumming is completed, the oil will be pumped into the alkaline refining reaction tank for the next section.

3D image of degumming part

3. Deacidification part

Alkali will be pumped to the alkali refining tank for acid and alkali neutralization, after the neutralization reaction, the oil needs to be heated to 80-90 degrees, because the optimal temperature for the separation of saponin from oil is 85-90 degrees, after the heating is completed, it will be transported into centrifuges.

4. Decolorization part

Under negative pressure, white clay will be pumped by white clay feeder directly to the high white clay tank. But in order to prevent white clay in the air, above the white clay tank, we configure the pulse dust collector to adsorb the white clay in the air. Below the white clay tank is the white clay quantifier, generally controlled by PLC. The white clay will fall into the white clay pre-mixing tank directly, at the same time, the oil pump will also beat the degumming oil into the tank, in addition, we configure the mixing fins in the tank to make the white clay and oil fully mixed. After mixing, it will be passed into the decolorization tower.

3D image of the decolorization part

5. Decolorization filtration part

After the decolorization is completed, it enters into the decolorized oil filtration section, we use the leaf filter. For large production lines, We generally recommend customers have two filters, one is to ensure the production efficiency, and the second is to prevent a device failure affecting the overall production.

6. Deodorization part

The deaerator is designed to remove air from the oil to prevent subsequent oxidation of the oil under high temperature conditions. Shield pump is a special oil pump to isolate the air, it will pump the oil in the deaerator to the deodorization tower.The temperature in deodorization tower is about 260 degrees, because the evaporation point of odor is larger than that of oil, the odorous substances are more likely to be volatilized. Therefore, the principle of steam distillation is applied for steam extraction and deodorization.

3D image of deodorization part

7. Heat conductive oil system

In the whole continuous refining, thermal oil is mainly used to heat the oil in deodorization section, after the oil is heated by the thermal oil furnace, which will be transported to each section that needs heat source.

It should be noted that for physical refining, there is generally no separate deacidification part, which is finished in deodorization tower with deodorization process together. While chemical refining is provided with a separate neutralization reaction deacidification part. If the edible oil refinery plant is batch type or semi-continuous type, it also contains these parts, but the equipment in every part will be less the full- continuous type.