Assessment of water degumming and acid degumming of mixed algal oil

Abstract

Crude algal oil from Chlorella sp. contained high amount of phospholipids, causing lower conversion rate of transesterification and difficulty in glycerol separation. Since the crude algal oil was solid at ambient temperature that could not go to degumming process straightly, it was mixed with refined palm oil in the ratio of 30:70w/w to obtain suitable viscosity for further processing. The response surface methodology with Box-Behnken design was applied to investigate water and acid degumming processes. The studied parameters were temperature, time, and amount of degumming reagent (water or phosphoric acid). The greatest phospholipid removal reached 82.5% under the optimum condition of acid degumming with temperature 90°C, 60min and phosphoric acid 0.42wt.%. The water degumming at optimum condition (temperature 100°C, 30min and water 80wt.%) only gave 19.4% phospholipid removal. The major phospholipids in Chlorella sp. oil was considered to be the non-hydratable phospholipids.