Solubility of swietenia mahagoni seed in supercritical carbon dioxide extraction

Abstract

Swietenia mahagoni (S. mahogany) is a group of plant that is known to have an insecticidal activity as well as medicinal uses such as hypertension, diabetes and malaria. The main purpose of this research was to study the effect of temperature, pressure, and solvent flow rate on extraction yield of S. mahagoni as well as to establish the solubility data for S. mahagoni. In this study, supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) extraction was applied for extraction of S. mahagoni oil from seeds at different temperatures (40 °C to 60 °C) and pressures (15 MPa to 35 MPa). The effects of temperature and pressure on the extraction yield and solubility of oil were determined. The current results showed that an increase of temperature and pressure increased the extraction of oil. In addition, the morphological of S. mahagoni structure before and after the extraction process was observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). For solubility study of S. mahagoni, a dynamic method of extraction was applied and a density based-model was used in comparison with experimental solubility data. The experimental solubility data for S. mahagoni was correlated with the Chrastil model with the lowest average absolute percent deviation (AAPD) value of 0.3315 with the values of parameter k, a and b as 4.7040, -6368.4400 and -10.9353, respectively. The optimization process was conducted using a commercial response surface methodology software. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that the value of R2 was 0.9391 implies that 93.91% of the total variance is explained by the model, indicating a good correlation and agreement between the experimental and the predicted values.