Research Engineer La Fabril SA Manta, Manabi, Ecuador
Abstract: In recent years there has been an increasing concern about the health issues caused by the intake of foods with high levels of minerals oils such as Mosh and Moah. Contamination with these substances may occur during transportation, processing, migration, through the environment, through use of contaminated food additives and/or processing aids. The objective of this research was to establish strategies to reduce the levels of Mosh and Moah in the crude palm oil mill.
A careful follow up of the extraction process from the fruit reception to the storage of crude palm oil and the identification of critical points of mineral oil contamination were performed. Samples were taken throughout the extraction process and sent to a certified laboratory in Germany for Mosh and Moah analysis for base-line construction. These results helped to define the actions to mitigate mineral oils such as establishment of a leak lubricant and lubricant consumption control systems, change of mineral based lubricants to synthetic low Mosh and Moah lubricants, separation of secondary flows (condensate and empty fruit bunch liquors) from main crude palm oil flow. These actions resulted in the decrease of Mosh from 100,0 to 9,9 mg/kg and of Moah from 17 to < 1 mg/kg in crude palm oil.
Many challenges were found. They were especially related to the high uncertainty of analytical methods for mineral oil determination, interference with biogenic substances in Moah analysis, low availability of the synthetic lubricants in our location and lower performance of the synthetic lubricants compared to mineral based lubricants.
