FRANTOIO AZIENDALE - come funziona e quali sono i suoi vantaggi?!

Renaioli Macchine Agricole, in collaboration with Toscana Enologica Mori and Azienda Agricola Poggio Carlo, is pleased to share a video showing the operation of the company's CULTIVAR olive mill, with a production capacity of 10 quintals/hour. The primary reason for purchasing a company-owned olive mill is to press the olives as quickly as possible after harvest. Once the olives are damaged during the harvest, the oxidation process begins, altering their organoleptic properties. Therefore, the more hours pass after harvest, the more the oil will lose its natural characteristics. In this video, we will analyze all the processing phases of the mill, highlighting the measures that allow us to produce an oil that maintains the organoleptic properties of the olives as intact as possible. The oil extraction process begins by loading the bins of olives into a machine called a DLE, which defoliates, washes, and elevates them. The DLE consists of a belt elevator with a hopper capable of holding 400 kg of olives. At the end of the elevator is the first aspirator, which removes 70-80% of the debris from the olives. The debris falls into the disc debrancher, where the branches emerge on one side and the remaining leaves are removed on the other by another aspirator. The cleaned olives fall into the washer, which uses hydropneumatic pressure to wash them and push them onto the unloading belt, where they are first rinsed with clean water and then dried until they fall into the crusher hopper. The crusher is equipped with an olive receiving hopper containing an auger driven by a variable speed drive that regulates the flow rate. The impeller is equipped with a pre-crusher and knives. The pre-crusher allows the olives to be broken into large pieces before moving on to the next stage. The hollow knives, mounted in a helical position with respect to the grid, allow the olives to be crushed gently, without causing excessive heating. Finally, an elliptical piston pump mounted under the crusher transfers the freshly produced paste to the malaxers. Before reaching the malaxers, however, the paste is passed through the heat exchanger pipes, which regulates the temperature of the paste coming from the crusher. The heat exchange is +/- 7 degrees compared to the inlet temperature. This measure is essential to bring the olive paste to the ideal temperature for processing, ensuring the quality of the raw material is not affected. The malaxation unit is composed of three malaxers, each equipped with a solenoid valve, paste inlet, and an elliptical piston pump for transfer to the decanter. The malaxers have a system that allows the olive paste to be mixed under vacuum, thus avoiding contact with air, preventing oxidation. The decanter, designed to operate at low temperatures, uses centrifugal force to separate the oil from the water and pomace in a single step. The 2.0 screw conveyor was designed to obtain an increasingly cleaner product without adding water. Furthermore, there is no increase in temperature during extraction. For those who wish, the oil produced by the decanter can be filtered with the EUR 40 filter, which eliminates olive processing residues. The pomace exiting the decanter is disposed of using a special pump that sends it to the pit separator, located in this case outside the facility. This machine was specifically designed to separate the olive pit from the pomace. The pomace enters the separation basket, where a three-bladed mixer centrifuges the product, removing the wet part and discarding the pits at the rear. The resulting product represents 13 to 18% of the processed olives. Finally, the pit-free pomace is loaded onto a trailer by an auger, ready for disposal. As you can see in the video, the pomace displays various colors based on its oxidation process. The lighter color means that the pomace arriving directly from the decanter has no oxidation and therefore, the oil has not been altered in any way during its production process.