Recovery Of Carotenes And Tocopherols From Palm Oil Mill Effluent Via Extraction And Chromatography

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Date
2010-04
Authors
Chan, Choi Yee
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Carotenes and tocopherols provide plenty of health benefits and are important in food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Due to the increasing demand for these natural products, this study aims to investigate the feasibility of recovering carotenes and tocopherols from agricultural wastewater abundantly available in Malaysia, which is the palm oil mill effluent (POME). Solvent extraction was used to retrieve oil from POME whereas adsorption chromatography approach was employed to recover carotenes and tocopherols from the extracted oil. The major components of the extracted oil from POME were found to be similar to crude palm oil, containing mainly α-carotene, β-carotene, α-tocopherol, γ-tocopherol and β- tocopherol. The experimental design results showed that solvent:POME ratio and mixing rate played significant roles in the oil and carotenes recovery from POME by using solvent extraction process. The optimum conditions obtained for extraction of oil and carotenes from POME were 8:10 n-hexane:POME ratio; 500 rpm mixing rate and 25 min mixing time. The β-carotene adsorption capacities increased with increasing initial concentration, contact time and temperature. Adsorption of β- carotene on silica gel and florisil were best fitted by the Langmuir isotherm model and pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The adsorption process was endothermic and spontaneous under the conditions studied. Silica gel showed better performance than florisil and aluminium oxide in separation of carotenes from extracted oil of POME by using adsorption chromatography. n-Hexane:ethanol system showed rather consistent performance regardless of the different initial oil loading and temperature used on the open column chromatography (OCC). The carotenes concentrations in n-hexane fractions increased when the extracted oil:adsorbent ratio increased. The central composite design revealed that solvent amount and oil:adsorbent ratio were significant factors influencing the carotenes and oil recoveries whereas only oil:adsorbent ratio affected the carotenes concentration recovered by OCC. Temperature was an insignificant factor for all the three responses. The elution profiles of low pressure liquid chromatography proved that the carotenes concentration was higher than tocopherols concentration in the extracted oil. The chromatogram showed sharper peaks at higher flow rate and smaller volume loading. Higher percentage of ethanol in the solvent system resulted in uneven distribution of carotenes and tocopherols. The optimum conditions for the low pressure liquid chromatography were obtained either by operating at low flow rate with high oil loading or at high flow rate with low oil loading using 96:4 (% v/v) n-hexane:ethanol. The dried POME sludge obtained in this study was feasible to be used as fertilizer due to its notable levels of nitrogen, potassium, calcium, magnesium, organic matter content and appropriate carbon to nitrogen ratio.
Description
Keywords
Recovery of carotenes and tocopherols from palm oil Mill , effluent via extraction and chromatography
Citation