Solubility examination of palm kernel oil in supercritical CO2 and its correlation with solvent density based model

Abstract

Application of supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) to vegetable oil extraction became an attractive technique due to its high solubility, short extraction time and simple purification. The method is considered as earth friendly technology due to the absence of chemical usage. Solubility of solute-SC-CO2 is an important data for application of the SC-CO2 extraction. In this work, the equilibrium solubility of the PKO in SC-CO2 has been examined using extraction curve analysis. The examinations were performed at temperature and pressure ranges of 323.15 K to 353.15 K and 20.7 to 34.5 MPa respectively. It was obtained that the experimental solubility were from 0.0160 to 0.0503 g oil/g CO2 depend on the extraction condition. The solubility experimental data was well correlated with a solvent density based model with absolute percent deviation of 0.96.