Deodorisation is the key process to produce high‐quality refined, bleached and deodorised palm oil (RBDPO) in a palm oil refinery. In this work, an integrated simulation–optimisation approach was adopted for the analysis of a deodorisation process in an operating palm oil refinery. The process includes a deodoriser unit that removes free fatty acids (FFA) from bleached palm oil (BPO), and a vacuum scrubber utilising palm fatty acid distillate (PFAD) to reduce the FFA content entering the vacuum system. Being a proprietary technology, deodoriser is not found in the standard models of commercial simulation software. Approximation was made in simulation, with results compared to plant data. Detailed analyses showed that the reduction of FFA content relies on deodorisation temperature and pressure, stripping steam flowrate, as well as the temperature and flowrate of PFAD entering the vacuum scrubber. An optimisation model was solved to maximise profit from the deodorisation. Results showed that the FFA content entering the vacuum system is reduced significantly by 49.7%, leading to higher recovery of FFA in PFAD and lower loss into the condenser section. Applying the optimum values to the refinery has resulted in FFA levels greater than 91.2% in PFAD and RBDPO yield improvement of 0.5%.

中文翻译：

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棕榈油脱臭过程中游离脂肪酸去除的集成模拟-优化方法

除臭是在棕榈油精炼厂生产高质量的精制，漂白和除臭的棕榈油（RBDPO）的关键过程。在这项工作中，采用了一种集成的模拟-优化方法来分析棕榈油精炼厂的除臭过程。该工艺包括除臭装置，该装置可从漂白的棕榈油（BPO）中去除游离脂肪酸（FFA ），以及利用棕榈脂肪酸馏出物的真空洗涤器（PFAD），以减少进入真空系统的FFA含量。作为专有技术，除臭剂在商业仿真软件的标准模型中找不到。在仿真中进行了近似，并将结果与​​工厂数据进行了比较。详细分析表明，FFA含量的降低取决于除臭温度和压力，汽提蒸汽流量以及进入真空洗涤塔的PFAD的温度和流量。解决了一个优化模型，以使除臭的利润最大化。结果表明，进入真空系统的FFA含量显着降低了49.7％，从而导致PFAD中FFA的回收率更高，而进入冷凝器段的损失则更低。将最佳值应用于精炼厂可使PFAD中的FFA含量大于91.2％，RBDPO的收率提高0.5％。