Estudo da adsorção de mistura de óleos de sementes de abóbora e côco

Abstract

With the growing demand for functional foods, the food industry has paid great attention to vegetable products and/or by-products that are important sources of oils with nutritional relevance, especially pumpkin seeds and coconut pulp, which are rich in unsaturated fat and saturated, respectively. This is reflected in the fatty acid composition of the oils, since in pumpkin seed oil preW dominates linoleic acid (about 50%), and in coconut oil lauric acid (more than 40%). On the other hand, the solid/liquid adsorption technique using adsorbents has been common practice in the reduction of impurities in crude oils. In order to obtain a nutritionally rich final product, this work aims to study the adsorption of the mixture of pumpkin and coconut seed oils in a proportion of 50:50% of the volume of the oils. These oils were obtained by mechanical extraction which gave a crude oil. The mixture of these oils was submitted to physicochemical and deW analyses, as compared with the values ​​standardized by INNOQ. From the results obtained, it was verified that the mixture of crude oils is not suitable for human consumption as it presented 7.49 ± 0.69 % m/m of impurities, 10.59 ± 1.07 meq of O2/kg of peroxide index and 6. 50 ± 0.10 mg NaOH/g acid number. With these results, this mixture of oils was subjected to clarification with activated clay, in order to improve its quality and appearance, with the addition of 0.5%, 1.5%, 2.5% and 3, 5% activated clay. The amount of 3.5% activated clay gave more satisfactory results, 0.04 ± 0.00 wt% impurities, 7.32 ± 0.57 meqO2/kg peroxide index, 0.43 ± 0 .06 of acidity index and 0.02 ± 0.00 of humidity, finding these results within the standard of quality of food oil required by Mozambican legislation. It was also verified the efficiency of activated clay in the removal of impurities by tracing adsorption isotherms, where the results were satisfactorily described by the Langmuir model, and from this model it was possible to infer that the adsorption was favorable (RL = 0.97) .(TRADUÇÃO NOSSA)