The palm oil mills extraction process requires the separation of oil-water-sludge emulsions. For this purpose, the use of sedimentation and/or centrifugation techniques have been required until now. However, significant losses persist in different process flows and new methods are needed to further decrease them, such as methods based on electromagnetic waves application. In the study, emulsions obtained from two flow processes, namely press liquor stream (PL) and recovered stream of the centrifugal step (RC), were exposed to microwave radiation with different exposure times. In the case of the press liquor stream, different oil/water dilution ratios were also studied. The sedimentation speed and efficiency were studied for the irradiated samples and compared to those obtained for the same fluids with no radiation. Also, chromatographic tests were performed on the recovered oil to determine the effect on the oil quality after microwave radiation. The obtained results allow us to conclude that microwave exposure during periods below 1 minute lead to better sedimentation speed and efficiency. It was observed that microwaves facilitate the break of the charges and polarities balances in the emulsions at considerably lower temperatures than the corresponding in the conventional process, without affecting the recovered oil quality.

中文翻译：

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通过微波技术分离棕榈油磨制过程中的油-水-污泥乳液

棕榈油厂的提取过程需要分离油-水-污泥乳液。为此，迄今为止一直需要使用沉降和/或离心技术。然而，在不同的工艺流程中仍然存在显着的损失，需要新的方法来进一步减少它们，例如基于电磁波应用的方法。在研究中，从两种流动过程中获得的乳液，即压榨液流 (PL) 和离心步骤的回收流 (RC)，暴露于不同暴露时间的微波辐射。在压榨液流的情况下，还研究了不同的油/水稀释比。研究了辐照样品的沉降速度和效率，并与没有辐照的相同流体获得的沉降速度和效率进行了比较。还，对回收的油进行色谱测试，以确定微波辐射后对油质量的影响。获得的结果使我们能够得出结论，在低于 1 分钟的时间内微波暴露会导致更好的沉降速度和效率。据观察，微波在比传统工艺中的相应温度低得多的温度下有助于打破乳液中的电荷和极性平衡，而不影响回收的油质量。