A Pilot Plant is a small processing system that is designed and operated to prove or test methods that may be used in full scale production plants. Within the Crown Milling Pilot Plant facility various types of equipment, including counter-current extractors, desolventizing and drying units, and a self-contained system for refining, bleaching and deodorizing edible oils are tested. 
Crown Milling’s Pilot Plant consists of two separate buildings:  the Preparation Building and the Extraction Processing Building.  The functions handled within each facility are listed below.

Preparation Building
This building prepares materials for extraction through multiple continuous activities including:

• Hot de-hull
• Cracking
• Aspiration
• Flaking
• Extruding
• Expelling
• Hammer milling
• Dry conditioning

Extraction Building
The Extraction Building is explosion-proof and has two skids providing the following refining capabilities:

• Interestification, hydrogenation and winterization and
• Refining, bleaching and deodorizing

Within this facility Crown Models III, IV and V along with our new Continuous Supercritical Extractor are being put on line so that the prepared materials can be fed to any of the four extractors.  In addition, the four extractors have the capability of feeding to either our traditional desolventizer or our edible desolventizing systems.
Besides the processes noted above, Crown Iron Works is continuously piloting other R&D technologies within the Pilot Plant facility.