Sunflower oil is widely used as cooking oil which is extracted by solvent extraction method or screw oil press method from sunflower seed.
Edible Oil Refinery usually refers to the refining of crude oil. The presence of impurities in the crude oil not only affects the edible value and safe storage of the oil, but also brings difficulties to deep processing of oils. However, the purpose of oil refining is not to remove all the impurities in the oil, but these impurities that are harmful to eating, storage or industrial uses, such as gossypol, protein, phospholipids, mucilage, moisture, etc.. While, some beneficial impurities, such as tocopherols, is retained. Therefore, the purpose of oil refining is to remove harmful impurities to obtain refined oil that meets certain quality standards. Sunflower oil refining is to obtain better quality vegetable oils and make it more conducive to human consumption.
Generally, Crude Sunflower oil have some undesirable oil-soluble & oil-insoluble impurities. These impurities are harmful for health & consumption and requires to remove. Sunflower Crude oil mainly contains hydratable & non-hydratable gums, free fatty acids, coloring pigments like Carotenoids, moisture, oxidative component like aldehyde & ketone, metallic element, waxes and other impurities.
Sunflower oil contains high amount of waxes comparatively to other soft oils so dewaxing is required in order to minimize the wax content.
Sunflower oil refining consists of the following sections
Degumming
Neutralisation
Bleaching
Dewaxing
Deodorisation / De-acidification
Generally, refining of crude vegetable oil defined by two methods: Physical refining and chemical refining. However, it doesn’t matter what kind of refining method to be used, they all are done with the help of various equipments & machinery inside the refinery and all the oils extracted from oil seeds like Sunflower, Cottonseed, Peanuts, Sesame, Soybean etc.