Methylester distillation
The distillers are towers with structured packing to fractionate heavy and light boiling impurities and to ensure that the methylesters are distilled at the lowest possible temperature.
Squeezing of the residue is carried out in a separate distiller.
Condensation can be carried out inside the tower over packing with cooling of an external pump around or outside the tower in shell and tubes condensers.
In both cases heat is recovered generating low pressure steam.
Canned pumps with falling film reboilers or centrifugal pumps with suppressed vaporisation reboilers are proposed according to the case.
Methylester fractional distillation
The single or multi towers plants are based on towers with structured packing.
Typical design of the towers foresees three products outlets ( top, sidedraw and bottom).
Of course all features of the distillation apply to the fractionation.
Methylester fractionation
Controlled cooling/crystallising followed by pressure membrane filtration is used for the production of oleic Fame.
Dry fractionation process leading to clean and simple operation guaranteeing a lower operating and investment cost.
Fatty Acid Methyl Ester Hydrogenation
The unit is designed to hydrogenate in a semi-continuous way the fatty acid methyl esters.
The hydrogenation is carried out in a reactor with a jet mixer.
Methyl esters are hydrogenated to very low IV in order to find applications for specific downstream processes.
Depending on the start IV of the incoming feed, heat of reaction can be utilized to generate low pressure steam in an external exchanger. To further improve the overall heat balance feed /effluent heat exchangers are foreseen.