Separating poly-unsaturated fatty acids from vegetable oil using urea complexation: the crystallisation temperature effects

Omega-6 fatty acids,such as linoleic acid (la) are essential poly-unsaturated fatty acids (pufas) which are very important on human health. the omega fatty acids intake as concentrate is preferred than consumes the whole oil. one of the methods used for separating pufas from the oil is urea complexation. this separation method is based on the capability of saturated fatty acids (sfas) to form complexes compound with urea. it was observed that temperature affected the pufas composition and yield of the concentrate (nonurea complexes fraction/nucf). corn oil,which is rich of pufas,was saponified and purified to produce fatty acids. urea was dissolved in ethanol then was added to the fatty acids to obtain crystal compound complexes. in this research,crystallisation was studied at different temperatures,i.e.,ambient temperature (30 °c),cooled temperature (5 °c) and frozen temperature (-15 °c). the filtrate consisted of nucf,which was rich of pufas. fatty acid composition in filtrate was analysed using gas chromatography. the nucf yields were measured by gravimetric method. the results showed that urea complexation needed crystallisation temperature below the ambient,to obtain significant yield of urea adduct. crystallisation in lower temperature produced higher concentration of pufas. however,this condition obtained lesser yield. © school of engineering,taylor’s university.