Comparative study of oil to bunch ratio for ripe and unripe oil palm fruits / Mior Hazrin Mior Hassan

Oil Palm is the major plantation crop in Malaysia. The production of oil palm is very important to Malaysian economic. Palm oil processing is the major oil industry in Malaysia since the Malaysia is one of the higher productions of oil palm in the world. This study would focus more on unripe oil palm bunch analysis. This research was done at Felda Sungai Tengi Palm Oil Mill. The selection sample was categorized from small, medium and large bunch. The palm oil extraction procedure began with sterilization process where the bunch that needed to be extract would be steam in sterilizer to soften the fruit mesocarp for easy to digestion and release of oil. The next process was continued with loosening the fruits from bunch with manually process. From this process, the weight of empty fruit bunch was obtained. Weight of fruitlet that was obtained from loosening manually process such as unripe fruit, ripe fruit, abnormal parthnenocarp and carlix leaves were taken the weight including weight of empty fruit bunch (EFB). That needs in get the percentage of oil in bunch. The extraction process has used soxhlet method process. This process was used to get an oil extraction from the mesocarp. As the result from this study, the small, medium and large size of bunch that have categories , the result was showed that the oil in bunch content more have in small bunch. The average of oil in small bunch was 13.28% in young bunch and 33.32% the oil in bunch content in ripe bunch. As the conclusion, this research can be further study in the future to get the quality of oil that have in unripe bunch.