Recorded: April 11, 2023

This webinar is brought to you by the Processing Division of AOCS.

Speaker: Alan Paine, ARP Lipids Consulting, United Kingdom

Description: The talk addresses the question of how we can make accurate assessments of what is happening in vegetable oil refineries. When we make measurements we can often find discrepancies that have to be investigated and sometimes the solution to a problem can be surprising.

The nuclear reprocessing industry can usually balance the materials entering and leaving their plants to within one part in a thousand but this did not prevent a centre in the UK reporting in 2005 that 30 kg of plutonium was unaccounted for, enough to make a number of bombs. Vegetable oil factories are not as closely monitored as nuclear facilities so it is difficult to balance flows to within one part in a thousand even though a thousandth of the production of a large refinery represents a large sum of money.

In a refinery performance test lasting 2 days it is hard to balance all the flows to within 0.5%. The talk will look at ways to improve this accuracy including the sodium balance method for measuring the performance of neutralization lines.

Along the way we shall look at how the speed of light was determined, how our expectations bias the way we interpret a result and why old panes of glass are thicker at the bottom than the top.