Oil mill is an processing factory that designed to extract oil from various oil-bearing seeds and oil-rich plants. The produced oil can be used for food industry as cooking oil, or other industry to make lubricants, biofuels or other products. At the same time, there will have oil cake or oil meal left after the oil is squeezed out from the raw materials. These oil cake or meal can be used in food or fertilizer.
Mini oil mill is a complete set oil processing factory with small capacity. Different from large scale oil mill plant, mini oil mill is more likely to enter local market and provide more possibilities for investors to step into vegetable oil production business. From efficiency and investment aspect, mechanical pressing extraction and batch oil refining are the most cost effective methods for a complete mini oil mill plant to ensure the profits. Mechanical pressing means to adopt small screw oil press machine to extract crude oil, while batch oil refining method means to produce high quality edible or non-edible oil through small size equipment.
Most of the oil-bearing seeds and oil-rich vegetable plants can be extracted oil at mini oil mill, including peanut/groundnut, palm kernel, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, mustard seeds, black seeds, moringa seeds, rice bran, rape seeds, soybean, copra, cottonseeds, grape seeds, tea seeds and more.
Although different raw materials may require different processing equipment, there are some equipment that is the basic for an oil mill. Firstly, some of oil processing auxiliary equipment used to treat seeds may be needed for best oil pressing results, such as cleaning sieve, destone machine and more. For example, if the raw material is peanuts with shells, it is needed to have a peanut sheller. Secondly, screw oil press is one of the most important unit since it the core part to get oil. Now, screw oil expeller is not limited to single screw oil press, the integrated oil press with filters are also popular for mini oil mill. Thirdly, the crude oil extracted from the oil press should be filtered to remove organic impurities, so the oil filter machine is also favorable for oil mill. Besides, oil refining unit is now more and more popular in small scale or mini oil mill plant, because it can help to get high quality and edible oil for human beings.