Peanut and sunflower seed pretreatment technology-oil mill plant

Peanuts and sunflower seeds are the main oil crops in China, and both are with high oil content, the most common way to deal with them is pre-pressing extraction, few small oil mill plant choose to use one-time pressing without full pretreatment.

AS the same as cottonseed, peanuts and sunflower seeds should go through the decorticating process before the pressing progress, the only different situation is it’s easy to decorticate peanut for the large gap between the peanut shells and kernels with hammer decorticating machine; while the sunflower seeds’ shell is relatively thin with small kernel, so it’s more difficult to decorticate, centrifugal decorticating machine usually has a better performance in this case. The rest of the treatments are pretty the same: softening, flaking, steaming and roasting, extrusion, drying and cooling. Cold-pressed oil’s color is lighter than leaching oil and high-temperature pressed oil, active substances are retained as for the low temperature in the progress. Seed pretreatment equipments are an indispensable part of the oil mill plant.

Special oilseeds pretreatment technologies are developed in recent years, for example: enzyme preparation in the biological engineering technology is gradually been applied in food processing industry. Use the enzyme (cellulase, hemicellulase, pectinase, protease, amylase) to treat oilseeds is a new technology, with the help of enzyme, oilseeds’ cells can be further damaged, and the release of fat would be more completely.