High pressure processing of residual vegetable oils to obtain value added products

N. COTABARREN; G. SOTO; P. HEGEL; S. PEREDA

Rosario

Congreso; World Congress on Oils & Fats and 31st ISF Lectureship Series; 2015

Asociación Argentina de Grasas y Aceites (ASAGA)

High pressure technology has emerged in the last years as an interesting alternative to transform the concept of chemical plants and lead to compact, safe, energy-efficient, environment-friendly sustainable processes. The supercritical fluid extraction for example has been commercially proven for the processing of natural products in order to obtain value-added products. The continuous non-catalytic supercritical alcohol transesterification technology is another interesting high pressure process useful to obtain biodiesel and acylglycerol derivatives from non-edible vegetable oil, waste cooking oils, and oil by-products.The great increase of worldwide production of soybean and sunflower oil, impacted not only in the oil market but also in the oil refining by-products (phospholipids sludge and distillates of the deodorizer), which prices are rapidly changing, and because of the high production volume of vegetable oils this by-products are becoming a waste with d isposal-associated problems. An alternative sustainable technology for this by-product is the direct alcoholysis of phospholipids and vegetable oil (triglycerides) occluded in the wet gum using high pressure supercritical ethanol to produce fatty acids ethyl esters (FAEE) and derivatives.Acylglycerols are high added-value products derived from vegetable oil. They are common food emulsifiers and surface active agents in many industrial cleaning products. An alternative pathway of synthesis is needed to improve the atomic efficiency of the purification process. Acylglycerols can be economically produced in biodiesel processing plants, carrying out an incomplete transesterification of vegetable oil.In this presentation, sustainable technologies for residues processing and vegetable oil recycling will be discussed. Moreover, also a high pressure technology for fractionation of fatty esters and monoglycerides up to high purity will be presented.