Recovery process of linoleic acid and tocopherol from ethanolic systems in ion-exchange resin

Abstract

Some vegetal oils as, for example, the cotton oil is sensitive to drastic conditions imposed by conventional refining process (chemical or physical refining). Those kinds of refining result in nutritional damages as losses of desirable substances, as nutraceutical compounds, and in economic damages, as high losses of neutral oil. The interest for cotton oil is because of its excellent performance in frying processes and also for its nutritional quality. This last factor is because of the essentials free fatty acids presence, the most important, the linoleic acid. The cotton oil also contains vitamin E, or alpha-tocopherol, a natural antioxidant responsible to prevents cardiovascular disease and some kinds of cancer. The liquid-liquid extraction can be used as an alternative refining process. This technology employed mild operation of process that makes possible obtain vegetable oils with high quantity of nutraceutical compounds and turn minimum the losses of natural oil. This refining process requires the recovery of the solvent, so that the extractant can be used again, and of the desirable substances loaded with the extract stream, as the linoleic acid and the vitamin E in the cotton oil refining. Ion exchange resins can be employed as a complement to the liquid-liquid extraction, allowing the separation of the free fatty acids from the extract phase and the recovery of others interest substances. In this way, this work has the objective of stud the model system behavior that represents the extract stream of the liquid-liquid process, considering the remove of substances as linoleic acid and vitamin E. Intended to obtain equilibrium isotherms for systems containing commercial linoleic acid + ethanol and tocopherol + ethanol.