Simulation of an Extractor for the Extraction of Vegetable Oil from Palm Kernel

Abstract

Industrial production of vegetable oil from palm kernel seed operational process was analysed in this research study with the extractor unit as the main focus of the study. The extractor unit consist of nine operational stages, which was modeled by applying the principle of the law of conservation of mass and energy respectively. The developed models were a set of ordinary differential equations, which were solved by using MatLab ODE 45 solver by applying industrial extractor plant data of Vegetable Oil Production Company. The developed models' results were compared with the industrial extractor plant data in terms of mass fraction of oil and temperature of the raffinate and mass fraction of oil and temperature of the extract and these yielded an absolute percentage error (deviation) of 7.0, 9.52, 3.29 and 2.29 respectively. Thus, the deviations are within the acceptable limits, which shows that the developed models predicts adequately the extraction process of vegetable oil production. In addition, the effects of mass flow rates of raffinate and extraction solvent were studied with increase in mass flow rate of raffinate reduces contact time between extraction solvent and the cake thereby reducing the efficiency of the extraction process with maximum amount of oil been extracted at the minimum flow rate of 300Kg/hr.