High pressure treatment of grape seed to Enhance the yield of oil extraction

Abstract

The combination of pre-treatments with natural matrices processing may induce higher extraction yields andlor reduce the treatment times involved. In this essay, the application of a high pressure treatment prior to the supercritical fluid extraction of grape seed (Vitis vinifera) oil has been investigated. Experiments show that, under the operating conditions adopted, the final extraction yield slightly decreases with increasing processing pressure. Up til1 3000 bar such effect is negligible, though a variation of 15.5% was measured at 5000 bar. With respect to the supercritical fluid extraction results, the comparison between cumulative curves achieved with treated and untreated grape seed evidenced faster kinetics in the former case, despite final yields were approximately the same. Therefore, combining a high pressure treatment with supercritical fluid extraction may certainly reduce C02 consumption to reach the same extractability under optimized operating conditions.