Extractability control for the virgin olive oil elaboration process

The olive paste preparation is one of the most important task within the olive oil elaboration process. It greatly determines the quality of the obtained oil, and imposes an upper bound on the achievable extraction yield. Currently, the master miller is the person in the plant who adjusts the productive process parameters. The decisions are based on his knowledge and it depends on the proposed elaboration objective. In this work, this knowledge has been employed to design an expert system based on fuzzy logic that permits the maximization of olive oil that is extracted from the olive paste using extractability models of the olive in each maturity index. For this purpose, the system by means of computer vision estimates the olive oil amount that is susceptible of being extracted from the continuous supervision of floating olive oil on the paste, while this paste is inside the thermo-mixer, during the malaxing phase. The main advantages of this methodology are the optimization of the supplied heat to the process and the malaxing time, in order to guarantee the final product quality and quantity whereas the production cost is reduced such as the energy consumption.