HEXANE ECONOMIZATION IN PALM KERNEL OIL PLANT: A STUDY AFTER PROCESS DESIGN IMPROVEMENT

Hexane (C6H14) is used as a solvent to extract oil from palm kernel to produce crude palm kernel oil (CPKO) which is a common cooking ingredient. The main intention of this research work is to reduce hexane loss during the extraction process of oil from palm kernel. This research project was carried out in a leading vegetable factory in Malaysia. Although this plant managed to get high yield (average 48.5 %) compare with other similar conventional plants in Malaysia but the hexane loss is very high, 8.5 litre/Metric Ton (l/MT) in average. To reduce the hexane loss, few modification jobs were carried out; adding of new shell and tube condenser, sealing of leakages and developed a set of standard operating procedures. Preliminary investigation after the improvement steps found that, reduction of hexane loss showed a decrease of about 30 % from the average of 9.5 % litre/MT of palm kernel 6.5 litre/MT of palm kernel after the improvement. This amounted of hexane savings of 3 litre/MT of palm kernel which is equivalent to about RM 727,660 for 8 months after the process improvement taken into effect

CFD SIMULATION FOR TRAY DRYER OPTIMIZATION

The paper presents the design and analysis of tray dryer system. The design was done in Solidwork while the analysis and simulation performed using ANSYS FLUENT. ANSYS FLUENT is a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software in which flow fields and other physics are calculated in detail for various engineering applications. The analysis was done to analyze heat transfer and temperature distribution, ressure, air flow and turbulence. Before generating the product in 3D modeling, the basic data or information of tray dryer system is required such as dimension of dryer equipment, air and heat source supply range, sizing method and etc. Through his step, the dryer system development and function ability can be clearly understood by the end of analyzing process is accomplished