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Gas‐Assisted Oilseed Pressing on an Industrial Scale
Author(s) -
Müller Marcus,
Eggers Rudolf
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of the american oil chemists' society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.512
H-Index - 117
eISSN - 1558-9331
pISSN - 0003-021X
DOI - 10.1007/s11746-014-2500-8
Subject(s) - pressing , piston (optics) , rapeseed , residual oil , residual , yield (engineering) , screw press , payback period , environmental science , materials science , petroleum engineering , engineering , mathematics , chemistry , metallurgy , composite material , production (economics) , physics , food science , algorithm , wavefront , economics , optics , macroeconomics
In previous work, gas‐assisted pressing (GAP) was evaluated in linear piston oil presses. These tests were important to determine optimal operating conditions and the effective mechanisms of GAP operations in modified‐cage screw presses. To test whether this technique can be applied on an industrial scale, a GAP screw‐press test run of rapeseed was performed on an industrial scale. Residual oil levels were reduced to 7.7 wt% by gas assistance at an average CO 2 pressure of 12.5 MPa compared with 9.9 wt% achieved by conventional pressing with the same process. The high residual values were due to the cold pre‐pressing nature of the experiment. The test run achieved a steady‐state operation. Oil quality was improved, and a payback period of investment under these conditions was conservatively calculated to be approximately 3 years. A predictive model of the increase in oil yield achievable with gas assistance is presented, and the results indicate that a temperature decrease below 361 K results in an even better oil yield. Therefore, gas assistance is a promising technique for the cold pressing of oilseeds.