Abstract
Palm oil uses are widespread in several industry segments. During refining process, minor compounds such as carotenoids, phytosterols, squalene and tocotrienols are lost. The β-carotene is lost due to the bleaching and the high temperature in the deodorization step. The aim of this work is to recover β-carotene before its degradation in the refining process, using adsorption-desorption strategy. Batch adsorption studies were evaluated for five adsorbents: Diaion HP20, Sepabeads SP70, Sepabeads SP700, Diaion HP2MGL, Amberlite XAD7HP. Modeling of kinetics and equilibrium curves were performed for the Sepabeads SP70, which had the best performance in adsorption. The best conditions for adsorption were at the concentration of 30% (w/w) oil in isopropyl alcohol (IPA) micelle at 30 °C for 180 min. Thermodynamics parameters of adsorption revealed a favorable, spontaneous and exothermic process associated with physical bonding. The studies performed on adsorbent reutilization proved that the regeneration is effective and allows the material reuse at least for 5 cycles without changing the adsorption capacity. Additionally, desorption was evaluated in single and multiple steps and the final enrichment factor was 3.40 ± 0.21. This process allows the palm oil utilization for edible purposes after the adsorption step while recovering β-carotene based on its physicochemical characterization.
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