Solubility of Swietenia Macrophylla seeds in supercritical carbon dioxide extraction

Abstract

Swietenia macrophylla seeds oil has been claimed to possess anti-diabetic, antioxidant and other health benefit properties which have garnered the interest from food and pharmaceutical industries. This study aimed to determine solubility data of S. macrophylla seeds oil in order to understand the behaviour of the separation process which is fundamental in the designing process. Solubility of S. macrophylla seeds oil in supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) was determined by using dynamic method at 20-30 MPa and 40-60 C at fixed CO2 flowrate, 2 mL/min. The solubility of S. macrophylla seeds oil obtained were 1.93 to 4.77 mg (g CO2)-1 and was increased with pressure and temperature. In this study, the Chrastil, Adachi-Lu, del Valle-Aguilera, Gordillo and Sparks as semi-empirical models were tested to fit the experimental data. The Sparks model showed the best-fitted model for S. macrophylla seeds oil solubility data with an average absolute relative deviation (AARD) of 7.76% and a high coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.992. It can be concluded that the semi-empirical model give good correlation between observed value and predicted value.