Thursday, 3 October 2013

Palm Oil Processes


Vegetable oils and their derivatives have a wide range of application not only in food industry but also play an important role in non-edible industry such as oleochemical production. The food application may include frying oils, margarines, and shortenings, confectionery lipids, cooking oils, salad oils, emulsifiers and animal food. For non-edible application, it may cover fatty acid production, fatty alcohol production, soaps, detergents, glycerine, biofuel, lubricants, and hydraulic fluids, pharmaceutical and cosmetic application.

However, the native form of vegetable oils has limited applications due to the various components in the oil. Generally, vegetable oil consist of a wide range of triglyceride with different fatty acid composition, monoglyceride, diglyceride, phospholipids, FFA, moisture and other impurities depending on type of toil.

As a result, refinery process is needed to remove impurities from the vegetable oil. Conventional refinery process consists of bleaching and deodorization step. Seed oils with high FFA may need to undergo a chemical refinery to neutralize the FFA prior to physical refining. Besides this, wide ranges of oils and fats modification process are used to modify the physical properties of vegetable oil. These modifications include interesterification, hydrogenation and fractionation.

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