RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT – PALM OIL ENGINEERING BULLETIN

OER boosters

mpob_admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:13:43 +0000

This article lists 17 OER boosters namely, Poor quality crop – get the FFB quality right, Contamination – strict enforcement, revoke license if necessary, Excessive trash in FFB – do not accept trash with FFB, Unripe crop – Need Strict Enforcement, – Long stalk (stalk should be as short as possible)- if not, such bunches should be rejected, confiscated and processed by the mill under unaccounted crop, Over-ripe crop – do not wait for bunches to be overripe, Mixed crop – harvest when bunches are just ripe, Loose fruits not collected – collect all loose fruits irrespective of the cost, Wet bunches – strict monitoring and enforcement, Rat infestation – rat elimination using barn owl, and many more.

Development of palm oil mill technology

mpob_admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:13:43 +0000

This topic is indeed a long one and probably can be written as a complete book if an attempt is made to cover all aspects of oil palm development in detail. In this article, the author purposely wanted to unveil to the palm oil community a glimpse of the historical past on the development of the industry. Many countries for whom oil palm was totally foreign have now emerged as giants of the industry making the countries from where it originated fading into oblivion during the past few decades. In the beginning, oil palm was only considered to be a decorative palm meant for gardens but today it has become a formidable commercial crop growing very fast throughout the world. A glimpse of all the latest technologies of recent origin is also discussed in this article, although it is possible some others could have been left out. The palm oil development in recent times had been quite rapid and probably in a decade or two, faster development is anticipated in the field of biodiesel, oleochemicals and some health products.

Challenges facing the palm oil industry

mpob_admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:13:58 +0000

It has been said many times that there will hardly be any drastic change in palm oil milling technology if mills continue to receive and process the FFB in its present form. The experience of past 50 years or so can testify this. However, it is justified to put on record here that there were many incremental improvement and changes in various unit operations, but these were hardly revolutionary in nature. The palm oil mills still rely on the massive heavy and huge steel vessels like sterilizers, cages and threshers to handle the fresh fruit bunch (FFB). Large quantities of steam and water are required to sterilize the FFB, either in full set or crushed form, and to dilute the crude oil slurry for oil recovery in the clarification process. The recent trend to reduce the water usage in the process has not been very encouraging. Most of the water used in the milling process, except the steam blowoff and exhaust-steam, ended up as palm oil mill effluent (POME) which has to be treated to comply with the Department of Environment (DOE) discharge standards.