Abstract
Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was applied to study the optimum condition of palm oil extraction from oil palm decanter cake (OPDC) using Soxhlet extraction and nhexane as solvent. The main objective of this study was to achieve maximum oil extraction by determining the optimum of two parameters such as reaction time and solid to solvent ratio. The optimum parameters were found to be at 4.92 hrs of reaction time and solid to solvent ratio of 1:10. The proposed model shows R2 value of 0.78 where the experimental parameters were significant to the result. The optimized data was employed for comparison of oil yield for OPDC without and with microwave pre-treatment. OPDC with microwave pre-treatment yielded 3.289±0.047 g of palm oil which was higher than OPDC without microwave pre-treatment which yielded only 3.107±0.085 g of palm oil. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis also revealed the abundance of C-H alkene stretch and C=O stretch, two major functional groups indicated the presence of fatty acid within the palm oil derived from both samples. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of decanter cake provided evidence that the OPDC with pre-treatment has more shrinkage on the surface after Soxhlet extraction compared to OPDC without pretreatment. Results of this study revealed that RSM helps to optimize parameters in agricultural processing.
Highlights
Oil palm sector is one of the most major industries in Malaysia
Response Surface Methodology is a great tool for designing laboratory-scale experiment while providing statistical analysis to support the data
The proposed model design by Response Surface Methodology (RSM) shows R2 value of 0.776 where the experimental parameters are significant to the result
Summary
Oil palm sector is one of the most major industries in Malaysia. Aside from being one of the largest palm oil producers, Malaysia generated a profusion amount of industrial waste (Liew et al, 2014). Environmental issues are being concerned greatly in Malaysia as the palm oil mill contributed much on environmental pollution from its waste such as oil palm decanter cake (OPDC). High production of biomass waste has negatively affected the total oil extraction rate (OER) of palm oil industry due to the losses of oil in the waste (Sahad et al, 2014). The solid biomass wastes are being used as the main source of energy input for few palm oil mills to produce electricity and steam for palm oil production process such as sterilizer (Wu et al, 2017). Research showed that palm oil can be use as biodiesel for the vehicle with a diesel engine (Archer et al, 2018)
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