Vegetable Oil Extraction

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Vegetable oils include safflower, peanut, corn, soybean, olive, and canola. There are many more and each may have specific uses for fried, baked, or cold-service foods.

Approximately 137 vegetable oil extraction plants are operated in the United States. We produce fats and oils includes cottonseed oil, soybean oil, vegetable oil (other than corn, cottonseed, and soybean).

Making vegetable oil with solvent utilizes the principle of extraction in chemistry. It selects a kind of organic solvent to extract oil content in vegetable seeds after close contact with feeding material. For rotating extractor, the prepared material is feeded into an inlet hopper at the top of the extractor. In the baskets, the material is extacted, rinsed, drained and then unloads. The material moves in a path counter current to the flow of solvent. The oil rich miscella is filtered before being pumped further to the distillation system.

The cake from oil press section could also be used as raw material for solvent extraction plant, the chemical way to extract oil. This kind of extraction uses chemical solvent to dissolve oil content contained in cake or oil seeds. Oil is collected by vaporizing solvent out which is later recycled. In configuring the solvent extraction plant, pre-pressing may be involved in which case seeds are lightly pressed leaving about 14% to 18% oil in pressed cake. Solvent extraction will further process these cakes and leave only 2% oil in the final cake (meal). This method results in higher capacity; Lower power consumption, lower wear & tear / maintenance and high extract efficiency. Thus it could be used as complement equipment to extract the oil remained in cake, which gives extra profit to entrepreneurs. Or the solvent extraction could be configured to process raw soybean and some other seeds directly.
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