PRESSURIZED LIQUID EXTRACTION OF SOYOIL - INFLUENCE OF PROCESS VARIABLES IN OIL RECOVERY AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION

The present work aimed to analyze the soybean oil yield via pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), using hexane as a solvent, and to monitor the energy consumption of the equipment during the extraction. In this analysis, the influence of temperature (T), volume of solvent (VS), static time (St), period of solvent contact with soybeans in each cycle, and the number of cycles (C) was evaluated on percentage of soybean oil recovered. The maximum percentage of oil recovery obtained in these experiments was 97.79% and occurred under conditions of maximum temperature (90 °C). Statistical analyzes that investigated the influence of different process variables on the recovery of soybean oil and energy consumption, showed that temperature was the only variable with a significant effect for both responses.