Applicability of experience from laboratory scale experiments to develop a more sustainable virgin olive oil industrial plant.

This paper aims to explore the opportunities of scaling up an ultrasound technique applied to virgin olive oil extraction plants. Many encouraging results have been demonstrated the goodness of the idea to perform an ultrasound treatment on olive paste, transforming the current malaxing batch process in a real continuous process. The social, economic, and environmental consequences of an innovative process are an integral part of the cost and benefit analysis. Also if the benefits of the employment of an energy saving technology cannot always be estimated easily, examining the SWOT analysis it is clear that this innovation can be successful because the benefits are major than the costs. The SWOT analysis confirms the applicability of this innovative technology to a full scale plants, and some hypothesis about the design of a new device which should overcome traditional malaxer have been proposed.