Fitting of broken and intact cell model to supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) of sunflower oil

Abstract

Abstract The present work is focused on the supercritical extraction and kinetic study of sunflower oil. The effect of operating parameters, namely pressure (20–40 MPa), temperature (333–373 K), solvent mass flow (0.83 × 10 − 4 to 2.50 × 10 − 4 kg/s), particle size (0.50–1.00 mm) and ethanol as co-solvent (0–10%) have been studied by a set of experiments. The outcomes of work show, extraction yield increases with increasing pressure, solvent mass flow and co-solvent. The retrograde phenomenon is also observed between 333 and 353 K. The experimental data have been used to simulate the broken and intact cell model and fitting parameters are optimized by the global optimization method. The model successfully fitted the experimental data at high pressure with lower particle size. Industrial relevance The sunflower seeds are a major source of good quality, high oleic acid, vegetable oil and Vitamin E. Hence, largely used in beauty care products, production of vegetable oil based fuel oil and lubricants. There are also many other applications of rich–oleic acid oils such as food, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, biodiesel production, and also as a feedstock for the oleo-chemical industry. In recent years, due to rigid environmental regulation and health concern, high pressure extraction of the vegetable oil with supercritical carbon dioxide has received considerable attention as a promising alternative to conventional solvent extraction and mechanical process. Hence, the present work is focused on extraction of seed oil by supercritical CO 2 . Moreover, for industrial application of supercritical fluid extraction, it is very important to study the kinetic model that gives large scale extraction curves with minimum error by using model fitting parameters with small scale experiment. There are large numbers of models based on different approach suggested by various researchers to fit experimental data of supercritical fluid extraction. Amongst them, the broken and intact cell model proposed by Sovova's (1994) is widely used to fit the experimental data of vegetable oil extraction. The broken and intact cell model has three fitting parameters and many authors have applied different optimization techniques to optimize these fitting parameters. Therefore, in the present work the optimized kinetic parameters of Sovova's model for sunflower oil extraction are obtained by applying the Box complex optimization method to study the influence of pressure, temperature, particle size, co-solvent and solvent flow rate of extraction yield.