The effect of Temperature, Residence Time and Particle Size on Extraction of Hevea Brasiliensis using n-Hexane as Solvent

Biodiesel is an alternative fuel produced from renewable vegetable oils, animal fats or
recycled cooking oils by transeste1ification reaction. Biodiesel has drawn significant
attention due to increasing environmental concern and diminishing petroleum reserves.
However, using edible oils to produce biodiesel is not encouraged because it is
competing resources with the food industry. Therefore, a possible solution to this issue is
to produce biodiesel from non-edible oils such as Hevea Brasiliensis seeds. Production
of Hevea Brasiliensis involve cultivation, oil extraction and transesteritication. In
conventional oil extraction, mechanical pressing is used. But, the residual oil left in the
oil cake may be anywhere from 6% to 14% by mechanical pressing. The solvent
extraction method recovers almost all the oils behind only 0.5% to 0.7% residual oil in
the raw material. Due to the increasing demand and investment on Hevea Brasiliensis
production. Thus, solvent extraction seems to be more economical tor large scale
production. N-hexane and water mixtures will be the solvent for the extraction. Using nhexane
will give advantages since it can cut down the processing cost. However, due to
the limited data on solvent extraction, the thennodynamics properties such as solidliquid
equilib1ium data, distribution coefficient, and enthalpy change and entropy change
is studied. Therefore, this study will suppm1s the production of biodiesel li·mn Hevea
Brasiliensis oil by using solvent extraction with n-hexane as the solvent.