GEA Westfalia Separator South Africa has received an order from the Western Cape-based fish product company, Oceana Brands, for two three-phase decanters.
The order requires the decanters to be installed at its St Helena Bay fishmeal operation for optimised process methods that are designed to achieve sustained, high quality fishmeal production.
These additional decanters will help utilise raw material to its fullest by efficiently separating fish oil and solids material for further processing into specialised aquaculture feed ingredients.
The Oceana Group uses a production process whereby fresh fish are cooked in indirect continuous cookers.
Fish solids, fish oil, and fishy water are then separated in the three-phase decanters supplied by GEA Westfalia. These decanters are designed to separate these masses inside the centrifuge at a rate of 10- 12m3 per hour.
Fish water extracted during the process has a high content of valuable dissolved proteins.
This is evaporated in a three-stage waste heat evaporator process to a fish water concentrate of 35%, which is fed back to the fish solids before final drying in indirect steam and hot air dryers.
Furthermore, fishmeal products are tested for microbiological contamination, so the decanters from the GEA Westfalia Separator Group are equipped with a clean-in-place (CIP) system for unsupervised cleaning control cycles.
Another feature of decanters is that their advanced process efficiency reduces the requirement for the addition of artificial stabilising agents typically used to aid the separation of oil, water, and fish solids in the conventional fishmeal process.
Also, the water/oil separation phase, associated with more traditional two-phase decanters, becomes optional when using these three-phase decanters – as high centrifugal forces inside three-phase decanters create adequate separation of fish solids, water and oil in the same treatment phase.
