Practical example on a small to medium-sized oil mill designed to process about 6,500 quintals of olives per year, partly on its own and partly on behalf of third parties.
From the moment of harvest, the olives must be processed possibly on the same day or, at the latest, within 2 days to prevent fermentation and / or degradation reactions of the olives. Considering that almost all the olives of a certain geographical area reach maturity and are harvested in extremely short times, it goes without saying that the mills have to concentrate their activity in a few weeks a year and that therefore their dimensions must be calibrated to divide the total expected load over a period of about 2 months.
Consider a production of EVO oil between 10 and 20 liters per 100 kg of processed olives; each liter of oil weighs about 920 grams. With our process we get about 20% more quality product than a traditional manufacturing process so we will get closer to obtaining 20 liters rather than 10: if from 100kg of olives we obtain 15 liters with the traditional system with CavitOil we will obtain about 18 liters of oil.
Instead of separating pits and pomace, we will limit ourselves to drying them both to bring them to 10% humidity and use them in the micro-gasification plant supplied with the system.
Knowing that electricity represents 75 to 83% of the costs of an oil mill, the transformation of processing waste into immediately usable energy for the processing itself represents an additional benefit of the CavitOil system. The gasification process heat will be used, during the normal operation of the mill, to dry the pomace and the pits and subsequently it will be available for district heating, greenhouses, heat pumps, etc.
Furthermore, the CavitOil processing process takes place at room temperature so there is no need to use thermal energy, making the approximately 4,400 kcal of pomace with pits fully available.
The dried weight of the pomace, including the pits, is approximately 25% of the total weight of the incoming olives (about 162.5 tons compared to 6500 quintals of olives). In 60 days, 108 quintals of olives will be processed every day (7 per hour) with an estimated consumption of 32 kWeh. Therefore, we prudently believe we need an energy system capable of delivering 50 kWh through gasification.
Therefore, considering a prudent average between dried pomace and pits equal to 4.4 kcal per kilogram and an electrical transformation yield of about 35%, a potential quantity of energy is obtained that is able to power the crusher electrically for the period of processing as well as produce the necessary to power the structure for a good part of the year (over 310 days a year for 16 hours a day).
Finally, it must be borne in mind that since it is self-produced electricity, it completely cuts the costs of the energy bill and not only the components relating to the energy item.
The higher oil yield leads to the production of about 19,500 liters more of product, 15,000 from proprietary olives.
Keeping the values envisaged for the quantities of olives firm, the annual savings added to the higher income from extra oil production can exceed € 230,000.00 each year. Without taking into account that with the adoption of the cavitation system and the decanter, the plant could manage much larger quantities annually.
