Evaluation of Sampling Procedure During the Enzymatic Degumming of Soybean oil using Phospholipase C-3G

Soybean oil is the second most consumed vegetable oil in the world and it represents 25% of the vegetable oils and fats consumption. The enzymatic degumming is a process that removes the phospholipids and uses the hydrophilic enzymes known as phospholipases. The phospholipase C-3G (PLC-3G) is an enzymatic cocktail composed by PLC-1G, PLA2 and PI-PLC and each enzyme attack a specific position of the phospholipids releasing FFA or diacylglycerol (DAG). Sampling during the process may help to reduce the number of experiments, but it also can interfere at the enzyme performance. Thus, the objective of this work is to evaluate the content of FFA (%), DAG (%), and phosphorus (P) (mg/kg) obtained after 120 min of consecutive processing, and at different sampling intervals (15, 30, 60, 120 min). The experiments were performed by using enzyme loadings of 50 and 200 mg/kg, 3% of water, temperature of 55oC, and pH value of 6.0. The crude oil was composed of: 0.92% FFA, 0.24 % DAG, and 608 mg/kg of P. By evaluating the enzyme loading, it was possible to verify that higher enzyme concentrations seem to have a better performance regarding the phosphorus reduction, and oil yield increase. Using a consecutive reaction time (120 min) and an enzyme loading of 200 mg/kg, resulted in a higher oil yield, with an increase of 49 % of FFA, and 69 % of DAG content, while it gave a phosphorus reduction of 98%. By using the sampling procedure it was possible to obtain a slightly reduction of the phosphorus content reaching 99%, while the FFA and DAG content decreased to values of 32% and 68 %, respectively. Hence, it can be concluded the PLC-3G enzyme performance concerning the oil yield increased was improved by the use of a consecutive reaction time.