Palm oil

Palm oil is one of the most widely produced oils in the world. The global demand for palm oil has grown rapidly over the last twenty years. It is used as a raw material in the food industry or by consumers as a finished product. Furthermore, palm oil is a basic feedstock for biodiesel production. Palm oil is extracted using a multi-stage process.

During palm oil extraction Decanter in 3 phases (i.e. the Decanter that works in 3 phases, with 3 outputs) is used to:

• The direct processing of crude oil after screw press
• Recover crude oil from sludge after storage tank
• Recover crude oil from wastewater from palm oil mill

Tricanter machine allows a three-phase separation, i.e. 3 output products are obtained: palm oil and waste water (with two different densities and specific weights), in addition to the solid fraction.

Palm oil is the most used vegetable fat in the world. In fact, on a global level, it is used both in the food industry (for frying, margarine, pastry and baked goods and most processed food products) and in the cosmetics and biodiesel production sector. Palm oil is used in many transformation chains and the economic factor certainly plays an important role given the high productivity per hectare of crops. It has many saturated fatty acids and therefore it contributes to providing flavour, friability and crunchiness; furthermore, they are more resistant to oxidation and rancidity processes.
For a long time, hydrogenated fatty acids, that is vegetable fats subjected to chemical hydrogenation processes to make them solid and resistant to rancidity at room temperature (margarines) have been used as a lipid ingredient. Currently palm oil is widely being used in the food industry as a replacement for these ingredients, which are considered harmful to health due to the high content of fatty acids with trans isomerism (trans fatty acids).

In the box on the right an illustration of the oil clarification process