Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Fractionation from Crude Palm Oil (CPO)

Abstract

Biodiesel is a fuel derived from vegetable oil. One of the vegetable oils that can be used in the manufacture of biodiesel is Crude Palm Oil (CPO). High-quality biodiesel must have a low iodine number and a high oxidation stability. This can be achieved if CPO does not contain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). It follows that in order to produce high-quality biodiesel, palm oil that contains high saturated fatty acids but that does not contain PUFA is needed. Therefore, it is necessary to fractionate PUFA with saturated fatty acids (SFA) and monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA). The purpose of this study was to separate PUFA in the form of linoleic acid from CPO and to determine the best conditions in the separation process to produce fatty acids with low iodine numbers. Fractionation was carried out at temperatures of 30 °C and 35 °C, with an extraction time of 3 h and 4 h, and with ratios of CPO and solvent of 1:2 and 1:3 (v/v). The solvents used were n-heptane and DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide). The results showed that linoleic acid could be separated from CPO using the fractionation method with the best conditions at a temperature of 35 °C, an extraction time of 4 h, a ratio of CPO and solvent of 1:3, an iodine number of 40.78766, and an oxidation stability of 19.03593 h. GC-MS analysis proved that the fractionated CPO did not contain linoleic acid. The lower the iodine number was, the higher the oxidation stability was.