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Compro has been designing and building edible oil processing systems, turnkey processing plants and pre-assembled systems for customers worldwide since 1972.

The new Compro Mini Deodorizer System is a continuous unit operating at 0.5 to 3 mm Hg absolute pressure and at temperatures up to 250 C. It will produce a bland product with residual FFAs of 0.05% or less from well prepared and refined oils, free fatty acids, flavors and odor bodies, monoglycerides, sterols, etc. Will distill, and break materials will precipitate. Due to the very short deodorizing time (less than 6 minutes) at elevated temperatures, hydrolyses losses are negligible. Transisomerization and double bond migration are also negligible.

Prior to entering the Deodorizer, the oil passes through a Deaerator. In the Deaerator, the oil is at 70 C; deaerated and dried by means of a vacuum line to the main ejector system. The operating pressure in the Deaerator is 25 mm Hg absolute. The deaerated oil then passes through a heat recovery exchanger where the oil is pre-heated to approx. 132 C and then an Electrical Heater to heat to deodorizing temperature and into the Deodorizer.

Oil leaves the Deodorizer tray by gravity to the Drop Tank located in the bottom of Deodorizer where citric acid or other anti-oxidants may be added and then pumped by the Drop tank pump through the heat recovery exchanger to preheat the deaerator feed, then through the after-cooler where it is cooled to 40 C, and finally through the polish filters to storage.

The fatty acids, which are stripped from the oil within the Deodorizer, are cooled and condensed in the Scrubber system to minimize contamination on the cooling water and to prevent problems due to fatty material in the plant effluent.

Vacuum can be drawn on the Deodorizer by means of a four stage condensing vacuum system or by Dry Vacuum Pump System.

The Deodorizer can be cleaned using a CIP system (Optional). A series of spray nozzles are situated inside at the top of the Deodorizer tray spraying down and draining through multiple drains. These drains allow the Deodorizer to drain in a matter of minutes.

As an option, some walls inside the Deodorizer tray can be supplied with heating jackets to help maintain a constant temperature through the Deodorizer.

Because of the extremely rapid processing, lower hot oil temperatures, and powerful stripping action of the Compro system, the removal of the “light” PAH‘s is accomplished and allows the EPA and DHA values to be preserved in almost their entirely.

This is ideal for oil intended for concentrating the Omega 3 fraction.

Compro StandardDesign Capacities

Compro installations can be found in Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, India, Africa, Caribbean, Europe, South America, Mexico, Canada and United States.

The process was developed to produce the highest quality product with the greatest flexibility, so that it can be adapted to general refining of various types of oil or to particular specialty oils. Today, the process is working with soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, groundnut, rapeseed, canola, mustard, palm, coconut, fish oils, all types of hardened fats and specialty oils such as jojoba, avocado and Brazil nut.

The equipment for the process has been devised with particular regard to operation and surveillance and an appropriate balance of automation and manual control. Normally the process is automatically operated from a main panel. It is, therefore, quite possible for a single operator to supervise more than one process unit.

The Zenith process is based on three semi continuous processing steps, degumming, neutralizing and bleaching. These are interconnected to form an automatically controlled continuous process from crude to bleached oil. After bleaching, the oil is processed in the Compro deodorizer.

The Compro deodorizer is a continuous unit operating at 3 mm Hg absolute pressure and at temperatures up to 250 c. It will produce a bland product with residual FFAs of 0.05% or less from well prepared and refined oils or hydrogenated stocks. Free fatty acids, flavour and odour bodies, monoglycerides, sterols, etc. will distill. Due to the very short deodorizing time at elevated temperatures, hydrolysis losses are negligible. Transisomerization and double bond migration is also negligible.

Oil retention time in the tray during normal operation is approximately 30 minutes. The oil passes through the distillation stages in approximately three minutes. The oil is retained at the proper level in the heating and cooling sections by the special overflow weirs.

Oil leaving the deodorizer flows by gravity to the drop tank, where citric acid or other anti oxidants may be added. It is then pumped by the drop tank pump through a heat exchanger to preheat the deaerator feed, then through the after cooler where it is cooled to 40 c, and finally through the polish filters to storage.

Compro has been designing and building edible oil processing systems, turnkey processing plants and pre-assembled systems for customers worldwide since 1972.

Since 1976, Compro has been involved in the treatment of marine oils to remove first pesticide residues and more recently, the higher molecular weight contaminants grouped as polycyclic hydrocarbons (PAH) frequently arising in the “hard” oils like coconut palm kernel, and some palm oil stearin fractions. The PAH’s also can arise from inadequate cleaning of tankers between cargoes. While the “light” PAH compounds (up to 4 rings) can usually be removed during normal deodorizing operations, the heavy PAH’s have to be absorbed on activated carbon and removed by filtration.

Compro has designed a simple process for treating crude fish oils that cleans up the oil by using a silica treatment combined with gentle bleaching and filtration, which ensures a feedstock for carbon treatment that filters well. This material is then treated with special activated carbon for absorption of the heavy PAH’s and filtered carefully to remove the contaminated carbon material. Whatever PAH’s are left in the oil can be removed during a deodorizing process. The products will generally meet European Union PAH limit after one treatment.

Because of the extremely rapid processing, lower hot oil temperatures, and powerful stripping action of the Compro system, this final removal of the “light” PAH’s is accomplished with about 20 minutes’ exposure to temperatures over 100 C, which allows the EPA and DHA values to be preserved in almost their entirely.This is ideal for oil intended for concentrating the Omega 3 fraction.

Compro installations can be found in Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, India, Africa, Caribbean, Europe, South America, Mexico, Canada and United States.

 

Benefits of Compro Fish Oil Processing

Market:

The market for fish oil is rapidly changing into a market for omega-3 (n3). Production for edible oil human consumption raises the value of fully refined products.

Producers of fish oil that make the move to supply the higher refined and hence good tasting product, will be seen as the leaders in the industry, reaping high profits with the same production. The later adaptors will be seen as the followers. As is the case in all fast-growing industries the leaders will make the bulk of the profits and followers will be forced to change just stay competitive earning the less and paying more for same equipment as the leaders.

Compro is a leader in the world market of fish oil processing having started research into purification techniques as early as the 7O’s and still has operating plants in the Europe, Asia, and South America.

The single most important consideration when dealing with fish oil is protecting the valuable omega-3 fatty acid from decomposition as it the desired compound. Then the biggest challenge is making the final product taste good without loss of the omega-3 fatty acid at high yields.

Compro specializes in small edible oil refineries of less than 100 tons per day, that in today’s market is tiny and a size that is not important to the larger equipment suppliers such as the Alfa-lavalsand DeSemtsof the world. These large equipment suppliers offer equipment that is either very old design not specially designed for fish oil or scaled down versions of equipment of vegetable oil plants.

Compro prefers to sell complete systems/plant skid mounted and ready to start taking the worry out of piping and welding site mounting problems of food processing equipment.

Compro offers equipment in small processing units such as just the deodorizer, or bleaching system.

Compro works with the customer to supply equipment that is custom to his needs. Compro’s prefers suppling Allen Bradley PLC controls and parts as they are most flexible, but often supplies other systems for specific customer needs so total communication is possible.

Compro’s deodorizer has specialized design features that make it the BEST deodorizer to remove flavors, odors, and oxidations compound out of fish oil with the least damage to the valuable omega-3 content.

Specifically, these features are:

• Thin raising film technology that combines steam stripping with thin film molecular distillation.
• All the oil is treated at the lowest possible vacuum levels of any deodorizer in the world (Better vacuum means better removal of bad flavors and oxidation product).
• Highest Efficiency of contact between the steam and oil at this low vacuum level resulting in lower utility requirements (Higher efficiency means less need for stripping steam means better vacuum means lower operating cost).
• Shortest exposure of the oil to high temperature of any deodorizer design. (Lower temperature for a shorter period of time = less decomposition of omega-3) Oil is at the processing temperature for less than 3 minutes and compared to typical plants of times like 30- 60 minutes.
• Smaller footprint for the plant making it easy to install (Easy to install means lower capital for the project and faster project time).
• Having a very small amount of oil at any time contained in the unit will result in easy stock changes and lowest loss.
• The unit design facilitates easy cleaning (critical in food and pharmaceutical applications).
• No moving parts or replacements parts needs outside of simple pumps.
• All contact parts are stainless steel.

Compro designed systems standards met the FDA/Canadian requirements for GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices for food) and supplies upgraded systems that met the higher USP pharmaceutical specifications for drug products.

Compro Bleaching system is specialized in the following way:

• Individual treatment chambers that allow treatment with multiple absorbents (allow optimization of bleaching process for feed oil means less loss means lowest processing cost and higher quality product).

Compro Neutralization:

• Zenith process does not need expensive centrifuge equipment.
• Improved safety.
• Lower strength of caustic is used and less caustic access means lower cost.
• Lower caustic strength used in process results in lower saponification loss means improved yields.

Compro is willing to enter in long term consulting and operational support such that after the equipment is supplied technical support will be supplied and if desired operational support can also be delivered.

If desired Compro has winterization that work as is traditionally done in Peru and multiple crystallization processes that result in increased yields of the high omega-3 fractions.

Compro is willing to work from the concept to final product providing support and advise in oil processing including what laboratory equipment and testing requirements are needed to establish high-quality product, personal training, recommendations of support utilities and oil handling before and after processing. (For example, Compro could work with the client to develop a GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) and HACCP (Hazard and Critical Control Point Plan) needed in most food processing operations today).

Fish Oil (Strip Ethylesters out of Fish Oil):

Compro design a new conception of stripping (Deodorization) to perform in both Capacity and product quality as well as hygienic (sanitary)

This system has to strip away the 10% Ethylesters down to 1% in the 500 Kg/Hr. The capacity of Fish Oil.

Because of the omega 3 concentrates are very delicate the heating must be done in a most gentle way to avoid side effects as Polymerization and Isomerization.

The System had to be designed at no higher temperature than 180 C, with temperature the stripping effect shall be high enough to reduce the Ethyl Ethylesters in the Omega 3 \triglcerides concentrates from 10% down to 1% in one run through in continuous mode.

We have to take into consideration that the Ethylesters are high in the EPA (Eicosapentaeonic Acid) (C22: 5 n-3) Omega 3 Fatty Acid and DHA (Docosahahexaeonis acid) (C22: 6 n-3) Omega 3 Fatty Acid, up to 65 – 70% by weight.

For the system to be efficient, CIP had to be designed so isolates parts of contaminated place where foaming/polymerization likely to occurs has to be eliminated such as pumps, heat exchanges, deodorizer compartments, etc.

The purpose of this new system is to strip Ethylesters out of fish oil in such gentle way so the Omega 3 can be taken without odor or flavor.

This method of hardening triglyceride oils involves changing the natural arrangement of the three fatty acids that are attached to the glycerol spine of the oil or fat molecule. It does not alter the fatty acid molecule as hydrogenation does, and so there is no chance for the formation of transisomers of the fatty acids, which is one of the nutritional difficulties of hydrogenated fats and oils. This is the main reason the process is considered an alternate to hydrogenation. The procedure rearranges the fatty acids on the glycerol spine so that in some cases a majority of saturated or higher molecular weight acids are attached to glycerol molecules, thereby making a fat with a higher melting point. The displaced unsaturated and shorter chain fatty acids become attached to the other glycerol spines to yield a lower melting point or soft/liquid fat fraction.

This is why the process is often called rearrangement. It can be done with a single oil, or with two different oils which together give the range of fatty acids that are needed to get the desired consistency. Controlling the temperature of the reaction is another way of controlling the rearrangement process, as fats which have all three linkages taken up with saturated or high melting fatty acids will crystallize out of the reaction, and then take no further part in the changes.

In the late 1970s, Compro designed an edible oil deodorizer (US patent 4,211,610), that utilized steam injection into a confined wall, resulting in a thin rising film of oil that was highly effective in stripping off flavours and fatty acids from the oil. This technology has been employed and used in hundreds of applications for oil processing and has been proven many times.

During operation, it has been demonstrated that the high turbulence, intimate contact of steam and feed, and consistent low pressure of the unit resulted in much higher efficiencies in steam stripping. This allowed the industry to develop into physical refining of oils, streaming free fatty acids and other low volatile oil contaminates out of feedstock. The high stripping efficiency has been demonstrated in production of low calorie fats and esters out of customized structural fats. The short time that the feed is held at low stripping temperatures has allowed the development of highly efficient fish oil deodorization processing -an area of excellence for Compro.

Compro has now modified the unit to reduce the cost and increase the recovery of the stripped compounds so that feeds as high as 70% strippable products can be separated and recovered. With these modifications, the new Compro unit will be useful in any Short Path Distillation processes. The unit has no moving parts, reducing vacuum leaks and improving operations. The unit can be fit inside any existing facility.

The unit will allow changing your Biodiesel into Edible Oils Refining from feed stocks of Soybean, Canola, Animal Fats, Fish Oil etc.

Biodiesel could use the equipment in both the pretreatment of feedstocks and post-purification of product. Low cost feedstock usually contains catalyst poisons that prevent their use in production. By stripping the fatty acids off the feedstocks, they can be sold for feed or industrial use or be converted into biodiesel fuel in separate reactors. On the back end, the unit can be used to steam distill the product, producing a “water white” distillate that will always meet the ASTM specifications. The residual can then be recycled to the operations for furtherprocessing. Our unique Distillation System removes Methanol, Glycerin, Sterols and Waxes so efficiently that the Cetane Value remains intact. These events take us to a level of excellence.

The Distillation System covers both the flash removal and steam removal of the Methyl Esters. This System will flash of 50% of the Methyl Esters and steam strip the balance in the Compro Distiller. The flash tanks and the Distiller are sized to allow 50% return and still meet the total Plant output.

Product quality and stability improved.

An add-on unit retro fitted to an existing semi continuous system can give up to a 30% increase in capacity with no increase in energy requirements.

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