OIL CAKE PROCESSING EQUIPMENT

To come up with the highest quality of oil extracted from oil seeds, it is highly essential that oil seeds are processed and are made to go through rigorous pre-seed treatment process. This process involves cleaning, dehulling, cracking, flaking, heating, and cooking of the oil seeds. This cleaning process helps in separating all the unwanted and impure materials like stones, dust, hulls, husks, metals, etc, from the oil seeds. After the seed treatment process is completed, the oil seeds are ready for the expelling process. By heating and reconditioning the seeds, the moisture content of the seeds increases by a large level, and the oil is easily expelled. For this process, oil expelling machines or expelling presses are used.

When the seeds are being crushed with the oil expellers, the oil is duly expelled during the process. The oil then flow through the drained barrel and is collected and sent for filtering and refining. The remaining coarse residue that is left behind is then discharged through the discharge outlet of the oil press. This residue is known as oil cake. Oil cakes are used for various purposes. Some of these cakes from seeds such as cotton seed contain toxic pigments as well. The cakes that are obtained through pre pressing contains about 15-20% of oil, which need to be extracted. So these are sent for solvent extraction for removal of residual oil. The remaining residue after the extraction are further used as animal feed and fertilizers. Due to their high nutrition value, these are considered as a healthy cattle and poultry feed.

The cakes come out as large sheets from the discharging end of the expeller presses. If these sheets cool down, it becomes difficult to carry out further operations like handling and bagging. The cakes cannot be bagged is they are too hard because of cooling. So it is highly important that the cakes are broken or grounded as soon as they are discharged. For this purpose equipment like Cake Breakers are to be used. There are other equipment that are used for cake processing, such as Cake Elevators and Cake Conveyors.

In order to execute the cake processing process in an efficient manner various equipment and machinery are available in the market. As oil cakes have multiple uses, it is important to use technologically developed equipment and machines for processing them. Some of the Cake Processing Equipment available in the market are categorized as follows: