Simulation of Triglyceride Purification from Crude Palm Oil using Single Solvent Continuous Counter Current Extraction

As the world’s largest crude palm oil (CPO) producer, Indonesia focuses on palm research, such as CPO-based cooking oil production. Generally, the widely applied production process in the industry is refining, which has several disadvantages, such as low energy efficiency and monochloropropane-1,2-diol (MCPD) formation. Under such conditions, CPO-based cooking oil production methods have been developed, with the continuous countercurrent extraction (CCE) method is considered the most effective for purifying triglyceride (TAG) as the main content of CPO-based cooking oil. The minimum content of TAG in cooking oil is 96% by mass according to SNI 7709:2019 (Indonesian cooking oil standard). Hence, to obtain the optimal production process that meets that standard, a simulation of TAG purification from CPO using the CCE method with a single solvent was conducted. This simulation obtained thermodynamic properties that correspond to the experimental extraction process, in which an industrial scale up can be acquired. The precise thermodynamic properties resulted from the precise selection of property package and Binary Interaction Parameter (BIP) estimation, and those are important because in this extraction process, liquid-liquid equilibrium works. This research used combinations of two property packages: Non-Random Two Liquid (NRTL) and Universal Quasi Chemical (UNIQUAC) and three BIP estimation methods: UNIQUAC functional activity coefficients (UNIFAC), UNIFAC-Lyngby, and UNIFAC-Dortmund. The simulation results were validated using existing experiments with statistical analysis such as relative error, R-Square, and p-value. The most valid simulation results were obtained by NRTL property package and UNIFAC-Lyngby BIP estimation and can be used to develop this TAG purification.