PALM KERNEL OIL SOLUBITY EXAMINATION AND ITS MODELING IN EXTRACTION PROCESS USING SUPERCRITICAL CARBON DIOXIDE

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 palm kernel oil (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 experimental solubility data was well correlated with a solvent density based model with absolute percent deviation of 0.96