Abstract: Animal feed processing has come under intense scrutiny in recent years as consumer advocacy groups, environment organizations and regulatory bodies have heightened concerns about food and environmental safety. This is being manifested in many regions around the world where recently announced regulation changes concerning the treatment of animal feed have sparked new oil seed meal process challenges. Some methods create an unwelcome reaction between the animal feed and the added reagent, while others involve excessive heat leads to protein that is less digestible- or, in many cases, a product that is not homogeneously heated. The heat treatment process is also energy intensive, resulting in significant operational costs and greenhouse gas emissions. In the case of the Netherlands-based Royal Agrifirm, the co-operative identified that to effectively reduce overall primary energy consumption in this meal production process, it still needed to pre-heat the product before using radio frequency(RF) technology- and then cool the product after the RF stage to ambient temperature for safe handling and storage. Also essential was the ability to recover energy from the hot product at the cooling stage, and then "upcycle" it for use back at the pre-heating stage. This case study will review the process of pre-heating and cooling of the meal using moving bed heat exchangers (MBHEs) and the use of a heat pump that creates a heating fluid temperature gain from the water rejected from the cooler, and then upcycles if for use in the preheater. The study will also highlight the technical considerations for energy recovery from oilseeds solids in the MBHEs and the improvements in carbon intensity and sustainability goals of oilseeds operations.
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