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