PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15866071
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-01
Publication Date: 2018-05
Patent Classification: ["426", "601000"]

Abstract:
The present invention relates to a method for treating vegetable oils and/or animal fats comprising a vacuum steam stripping operation, condensing the neutral oils from vapour phase at an elevated temperature, retaining and sending back to the stripping column, allowing steam, volatile fatty acids, micronutrients together with other volatiles to pass to a cold condensation zone, and condensing the volatile fatty acids, micronutrients together with other volatiles in the cold condensation zone, producing a condensate and a stream of steam, non-condensable gases along with traces of fatty acids and other lighter hydrocarbons vapours. The invention may include a distillation step, either between the high and low temperature condensation zones or following the cold condensation zone.

Claim (Index 1):
A method for treating vegetable oils and/or animal fats comprising:\n (i) feeding an oily feed stream to a vacuum steam stripping column operating at a vacuum level of at least 1 mbar, said oily feed stream comprising (a) volatiles, said volatiles comprising volatile fatty acids and other volatiles, (b) micronutrients and (c) neutral oils, and stripping off components comprising volatiles, micronutrients and neutral oils; and recovering non-volatilized neutral oils as a product neutral oil stream; (ii) feeding the stripped off components to a high temperature condensing zone, condensing the neutral oils from vapour phase at an elevated temperature of at least 150\u00b0 C., obtaining condensed neutral oils, retaining and returning some portion of the condensed neutral oils present in the high temperature condensing zone directly or indirectly to the feed point of the vacuum steam stripping column, and allowing steam, volatile fatty acids, other volatiles, and micronutrients to pass to a cold condensation zone in step (iii) or allowing steam, volatile fatty acids, other volatiles and micronutrients to be fed to a distillation column in a distilling step before the cold condensation zone in step (iii); (iii) condensing the volatile fatty acids, other volatiles and micronutrients in the cold condensation zone at a temperature of at least 25\u00b0 C., obtaining a condensate comprising volatile fatty acids, other volatiles and micronutrients and a stream comprising steam, non-condensable gases, traces of fatty acids and other lighter hydrocarbons vapours, and allowing said stream to continue to vacuum system; and (iv) distilling comprising step (a) or (b):\n (a) feeding the condensate from the cold condensation zone to a distilling column and distilling in vacuum of at least 0.001 mbar, and obtaining a fatty acid product stream and a micronutrients product stream; or \n (b) feeding the steam, volatile fatty acids, other volatiles, and micronutrients into the distillation column prior to the cold condensation zone, and feeding the condensate comprising volatile fatty acids and micronutrients obtained from the cold condensation zone to the same distillation column and conducting a reflux of condensate to obtain a micronutrients product stream from the distillation column and to obtain a fatty acid product stream from the cold condensation zone.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 27.0
- Percentile: 86.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.76389
- Patent Class: 426.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: True
- Related Applications: ['14406286', '14783348', '13869468', '14111398', '13583112']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.7700366991001176
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5996357174522059
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7529966009353265
- Mean Citation Score: 386.84442
- Max Citation Score: 561.85114
- Similarity Product: 457.2777796646881

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 0
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test