Quality of borage seed oil extracted by liquid and supercritical carbon dioxide

✍ Scribed by A Molero Gómez; E Martı́nez de la Ossa

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 170 KB
• Volume: 88
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1385-8947
• DOI: 10.1016/s1385-8947(01)00260-1

✦ Synopsis

This paper describes the extraction of borage seed oil by liquid and supercritical carbon dioxide, from the point of view of both operative method and pre-treatment of raw material. The best conditions for borage seed oil extraction are obtained at 300 bar, 40 • C and a solvent flow rate of 1.5 l/min at STP. The yields obtained are very similar to those resulting from the conventional extraction process using hexane as solvent (26.0 wt.%); however, the quality of oil extracted by supercritical fluid is higher (acidity, 11.0; unsaponifiables, 1.8). The fatty acid composition of the borage seed oil extracted by SFE is particularly rich in unsaturated fatty acids, especially the ␥-linolenic acid (21.7%).

For these reasons, the borage seed oil extracted using carbon dioxide could be competitive with the conventional process, since it simplifies considerably the oil refinement stages and completely eliminates the solvent distillation stage, which are the most costly processing stages in terms of energy consumption.