1．Palm fruit main value
Palm oil
Palm oil is made by boiling or rolling palm fruit and palm kernel oil is made by pressing palm kernel. Palm oil is now the world’s second-largest edible vegetable oil. Palm oil is very competitive in the world edible oil market because of its low cost and low price.
Refined palm oil is reddish-brown and semisolid at room temperature. Palm kernel oil is extracted from the nucleoli of the palm fruit. If 100t palm oil is produced, 10 ~ 13t palm kernel oil can be obtained. The nature of the two is quite different. Palm oil is mainly composed of triglyceride, and its properties (such as melting point, crystallization mode, etc.) depend on the structure of the fatty acid carbon chain and the number of carbon atoms in triglyceride.Palm oil has a melting point of 30.8 ~ 37.6°C, iodine value of 50.6 ~ 55.1, relative density of 0.888 ~ 0.889, refractive index of 1.455 ~ 1.456.Palm oil is 50% saturated and 50% unsaturated. This average state enables palm oil to have better oxidation stability compared with other vegetable oils (soybean oil, vegetable oil, peanut oil, corn oil, etc.).At the same time, palm oil contains 500 to 700 mg/kg of carotenoids (alpha, beta carotenoids), which are good antioxidants in crude palm oil but are destroyed by high temperatures in refining and deodorization. The content of VE and triene tocopherol in palm hair oil is 600 ~ 1 000 mg/kg.VE and triene tocopherol are natural antioxidants. Palm oil has less cholesterol than other vegetable oils and is less refined. Palm oil is one of the most stable vegetable oils, thanks to its natural antioxidants and a balance of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids.
2．Status quo of palm fruit utilization
Palm trees were first produced in Africa and are a traditional industry in Africa. Malaysia is a palm tree growing power, palm industry is one of the big economic pillar, the planting area of more than 4 million hm2, 2012 brought about $6 billion of revenue to Malaysia, but still picked for hand palm fruit picking, and it is to hire foreign workers, not only low efficiency, and a large number of overseas workers brought a lot of social problems. As a result, Malaysia is in urgent need of a palm-fruit picking machine to improve the efficiency of picking and alleviate the social problems caused by the influx of overseas labor. In recent years, the Malaysian government has invested heavily in research on palm fruit picking, but no breakthrough has been made. In addition to Malaysia, Indonesia is also a major palm oil producer, producing more than 30 million tons of palm oil by 2013. However, despite the high yield of palm oil in Indonesia, the picking method is still dominated by manual cutting, with high labor intensity and low operating efficiency, which requires a lot of human resources. In the harvest season, there is often a shortage of hands, so that the harvest efficiency of palm fruit is not high, thus reducing its economic benefits. Therefore, the picking conditions of the whole palm industry are in urgent need of improvement, as well as efficient and convenient palm fruit picking technology and equipment, so as to reduce the labor intensity of workers and improve harvest efficiency.