Solvent recovery from soybean oil/n-butane mixtures using a hollow fiber ultrafiltration membrane

Abstract

-The aim of this work was the study on the separation of soybean oil/n-butane mixtures using a commercial hollow fiber ultrafiltration membrane (50 kDa). Oil/n-butane mixtures with mass ratios of 1:1 and 1:3 (wt), with the feed pressures of 5, 7 and 10 bar and transmembrane pressure of 1 bar were studied. Rejections of oil between 21 to 97.2%, oil fluxes between 0.04 and 0.98 kg/m 2 h and n-butane fluxes between 4 and 46 kg/m 2 h were observed, strongly influenced by the feed concentration. The increase in oil/n-butane mass ratio caused an increase in oil rejection and a decrease in the permeate flux of oil for most assays. The increase in the operating pressure caused an increase in oil flux and a consequent decrease in oil rejection. No degradation was observed in the membrane module during the operation with this non-aqueous feed stream, as confirmed by integrity tests.

Desolventizing organic solvent-soybean oil miscella using ultrafiltration ceramic membranes

“…Table 1 shows the specifications of the membranes used in this work. The choice of the membranes investigated in this work was based on previous experience of our research group [5][6][7][8][9].…”

“…The first report on membrane separation for oil/solvent mixtures was focused on using polymeric membranes, which present as main disadvantages inherent incrustation, plasticization and swelling when in contact with solutes and organic solvents, hence leading to the reduction of its industrial life time [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Ceramic membranes, in spite of the higher initial cost, present a great potential application in the separation of solutes from non-aqueous solutions, since the interactions of the solutes and solvents with the membrane ceramic material are much smaller when compared with polymeric membranes [13][14][15].…”

Fatty acid profile of pecan nut oils obtained from pressurized n-butane and cold pressing compared with commercial oils

“…When gases at ambient conditions such as propane and nbutane are liquefied, its physicochemical properties become adequate for extraction purposes, and are considered non-toxic solvents (Yang et al 2004). Another advantage is the complete removal of the solvent after the extraction by reducing pressure, resulting in solvent-free oil (Tres et al 2014). N-butane is plenty available, cheaper and it can be used in much lower pressures compared to carbon dioxide.…”

Organic solvent nanofiltration of binary vegetable oil/terpene mixtures: Experiments and modelling

“…where ∆m P is the mass (kg) of the permeate collected at time ∆t (hr), A is the membrane active area (42×10 -4 m 2 ) and ρ P (kg L -1 ) is the permeate density. The oil retention in the permeate solution was determined by the solvent evaporation method [26,27,34,65]. A 3-ml sample was weighed and placed in a vacuum oven at 120 °C for 4 hours to remove the residual solvent.…”

“…The utilisation of membrane technology in the recovery of solvents from vegetable oil mixtures has been reported in some studies [20,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Kuk et al [32] investigated the recovery of ethanol from ethanol-cotton oil mixtures using a commercial reverse osmosis membrane.…”