Energy efficiency improvement and renewable energy implementation for copra oil extraction process

Abstract

The global demand for coconut oil has become more as the shortage of raw material and war happening across the world. Each country needs to find or ensure they have adequate supply of food for the internal usage. The current copra oil extraction method is similar to other seeds available which is using the expeller press method. The process has been in the market for very long and has been used by most of the copra producers. To ensure the market player has a more competitive processing plant in terms of energy efficiency and less impact to the environment, this research help to fill the major gap which helps to reduce the impact. To do benchmarking and to obtain live data, the suitable key energy consumption indicator is identified based on the performance of the current operational system and all necessary improvement is added as needed to increase the production rate while reducing the energy consumption of the overall plant. All data and information is collected based on actual operation of a plant. The plants performance has been monitored and a lot of improvement needed to be done on many part of the operational features. The main feature which we have studied and implemented is the additional plant which is called the “Solvent Extraction Plant”. The adding of this feature will actually increase the overall capacity of the plant by nearly 40% while maintaining or reducing the overall energy consumption of the plant by 5%-8%. Other than the above improvement, Renewable energy is also implemented on the plant. 2 type of RE is implemented which is the Solar power system which will substitute or reduce the usage of the Grid supply by 5% with the available space. The capacity of the solar system can be optimized by increasing the space or changing the solar panel spec to a higher efficiency panels. As for the Biomass Boiler which is introduced to the plant, the main function to reduce the dependency on the bunker oil and to reduce carbon footprint. The biomass boiler is considered good for this plant as they have abundance of coconut shell which is underutilized at this moment. Thus we have the opportunity of fine tuning the copra extraction plant energy efficiency while increasing the overall capacity, our main aim is to improve and extend the same solution or technology to other Copra extraction plants in Malaysia. Even if a lot of players are aware of the technology but they have not implemented on the solution because of lack of experience and working models.