Comparison of expander and Instant Controlled Pressure-Drop DIC technologies as thermomechanical pretreatments in enhancing solvent extraction of vegetal soybean oil

Abstract

As an intensification process of the unit operation of vegetable oil extraction, the cooking pre-treatment systematically results in damaging thermal degradations. However, recently, two thermomechanical expansion processes have been suggested and applied at industrial scales to pre-treat oilseeds: expansion and instant controlled pressure drop DIC. In both cases, it is a flash transformation from high-temperature/high-pressure to 100 °C/atmospheric pressure and 33 °C/vacuum phases, respectively. The use of DIC resulted in cumulative impact yields of 247 mg oil/g db, compared to 210, 230, and 224 for cracking, cracking/blocking, and expanding, respectively. To achieve the same yields obtained in 160 min for cracked or cracked/flaked soybean, the expander took 120 min against 35 min for DIC. Besides, thanks to the short heat treatment and the induced instant cooling, DIC allowed the highest preservation of soybean oil quality, with fatty acid concentrations almost identical to that of untreated seeds. Practical impacts: In the sector of the vegetal oil industry, researchers and engineers mostly look for increasing the extraction yields while preserving or improving the sensorial and biochemical quality of the oil. Henceforth, the modification of the oleaginous seed texture may usually be the major factor affecting and normally enhancing the capacity of extraction. Based on the improvement of material structure through adequate expansion, the higher the volume of vapor issued from the autovaporization throughout the instant controlled pressure-drop (DIC) technology, the higher the oil yields. Moreover, using the instantaneous thermodynamic theory, the feasibility of integrating DIC technology as an HTST treatment in the industrial-scale soybean extraction process could be performed and optimized without any biochemical degradation.

Keywords

• Texturing
• Instant Controlled Pressure-Drop (DIC)
• Coupled washing-diffusion modeling
• Effective solvent diffusion
• Oil quality preservation