Authors : J. D. Udonne, V. E. Efevokhoun and E. S. Sanni
Abstract: Cosmetic industries, bioenergy industries, agro and oleo chemical industries among few are in great demand for palm oil as raw material. For the palm oil to be used, it has to be refined to remove impurities that have altered the chemical state of the oil. Thus, as a result of this adsorbents have to be used to remove these organic pigments, metallic traces, etc. This research effort made an investigation into the use of local clay within Nigeria (particularly Iseyin clay) in the refining process of crude palm oil, by acid activation of the clay and corroborated it to be a close substitute to be considered over expensive imported adsorbents, e.g. fuller’s earth, etc. The results show that the bleaching rate varies directly with the contact time, temperature as well as the dosage of the clay. The project results also gave reasonable correlations of R2 = 0.9035 and R2 = 0.8954 when the experimental results were, respectively subjected to both Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption isotherms. The adsorption process was found to be exothermic △H = with 0.259 kJ mol–1.
J. D. Udonne, V. E. Efevokhoun and E. S. Sanni, 2016. An Assessment of Refining of Crude Palm Oil Using Local Clay. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 11: 1402-1407.