Recovery of low temperature heat in oil mills

Abstract

Energy consumption in oil mills is a major item of costs and a sensitive point in the production of biofuels. To improve their performance, industrials can recover lowtemperature heat thanks to a new technology of heat exchangers suitable for treating granular solid materials. Information about the energy requirements of the rapeseed crushing being not readily available, the article gives a detailed assessment of consumption items (per ton of seed: 263 MJ for preparation operations and 284 MJ for solvent extraction). These exchangers used as pre-conditioners saves about 55 MJ.t−1 of heat by use of steam condensates. We could go further in use of these devices on the one hand to recover heat from press cake and meal, and secondly to use recovered energy to dry and warm up the seeds before pre-pressing. In this configuration, the energy savings could reach 38% of current needs.