Phospholipids removal for feedstock oil and biodiesel production from unutilized rubber tree seed

Abstract

Recently, World-wide trends like high mineral oil price and Kyoto protocol make a great business in the field of foreign biomass resource development, especially in the oil crop plantation and new superior species development having high vegetable oil yield in the tropical or South Asian region due to the increased biodiesel feedstock oil demand. To use the oil containing foreign biomass efficiently, high performance extraction and purification process is required to meet technological demand in the foreign oil seeds plantation and utilization field. In this thesis, it was tried to develop a process to extract oil from the rubber tree seeds originating from China and South Asian country and remove major undesirable contaminants from the oil efficiently in order to use the tropical oil as a biodiesel feedstock oil in the commercial biodiesel production plants without further purification and/or axillary unit or utilities. To accomplish this goal, various experiments and analysis were performed to make a conceptual and basic design of the extraction/purification process for the production of high quality biodiesel feedstock oils. In order to develop a biodiesel feedstock oil production process, technological goals like oil extraction/purification overall yield more than 66.5% based on the original oil content of the oil-seeds, and major contaminants such as total contaminations less than 24ppm, water content less than 0.10%, phosphorous content less than 20ppm, and free fatty acid content less than 0.5% were established to meet current biodiesel feedstock oil quality. Survey on the current technology of production of biodiesel and its feedstock oil extraction and purification from oil seeds such as mechanical extraction and solvent extraction, degumming process as a physical refining, determination of desirable extraction and refining process to produce biodiesel feedstock, rubber seed oil property analysis such as density, viscosity, contamination, water, fre...