The economy has become universal and competitive, thus the industries of vegetable oil extraction must advance in the sense of minimising production costs and, at the same time, generating products that obey more rigorous patterns of quality, including solutions that do not damage the environment. The conventional oilseed processing uses hexane as solvent. However, this solvent is toxic and highly flammable. Thus the search of substitutes for hexane in oleaginous extraction process has increased in the last years. The supercritical carbon dioxide is a potential substitute for hexane, but it is necessary more detailed studies to understand the phenomena taking place in such process. Thus, in this work a diffusive model for semi-continuous (batch for the solids and continuous for the solvent) isothermal and isobaric extraction process using supercritical carbon dioxide is presented and submitted to a parametric sensitivity analysis by means of a factorial design in two levels. The model parameters were disturbed and their main effects analysed, so that it is possible to propose strategies for high performance operation.
Supercritical Fluid Extraction; Natural Oil; Parametric Sensitivity; Factorial Design
