Extraction of high value products from avocado waste biomass

Abstract

This work studies the oil extraction and recovery of bioactive compounds from Brazilian and Mexican avocado seeds and peels of Hass cultivar using Soxhlet (SE) with hexane, ethanol, and ethyl acetate as solvents; and supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) with ethanol and ethyl acetate as cosolvents. Also, the fatty acids (FAs) profile, total phenolic content (TPC), and antioxidant activity (AA) in avocado seeds measured. Finally, the dynamic extraction curves of scCO2 were modeled with a multi-way partial least squares regression (MPLSR).The highest extraction yields were observed when ethanol is used as solvent in SE (up to 14 wt%) and as cosolvent in scCO2 (up to 6.9 wt%). TPC was higher in SFE of avocado seeds, while higher values of AA were obtained using SE. MPLSR model obtained for the scCO2 extraction showed an average absolute deviation below 0.5 wt% for 360 measurements using only eight factors.