Electrostatic Conditioning of Vegetable Oil and Biodiesel

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Production of oil from canola, soy and other seed is energy intensive and substantial amounts of oil are lost in oil refining. A two percent increase in oil yield from refining soy would produce enough oil to feed 120 million people, conserve 4.5 million acres of farmland, prevent 1,600,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and save $1 billion dollars annually. Canadian production of canola oil is 3.6 million tonnes per year ($26.7 billion annually). Seed oil extracted in Canada is sold in crude, partially refined or refined forms. Oil refining improves odour, flavour, colour, and other quality aspects by removing particles, micro-organisms, phospholipids, and free fatty acids (FFA). Refining losses range from 2~5 % of the oil (>$150 million in Canada). Innovative oil refining methods can mitigate oil refining losses. ***Low dielectric industrial oils may be cleaned by high voltage electric fields that aggregate and remove nanometer size oil particles. Canola and soy oil are also low dielectric fluids, therefore, many polar vegetable oil impurities are nanoparticles that would likely aggregate in an electrostatic field. Theoretically, vegetable oil could be refined without additives by using electrostatic fields to assist in coalescing and immobilizing these nanometer size contaminants. Electrostatic refining has not been applied to food oils in commerce. ***We hypothesize that electrostatic fields can refine vegetable oils directly or in conjunction with nanometer scale absorbents. We propose to investigate electrostatic fields, and nanoscale absorbents as a strategy for refining vegetable oils and mitigating refining losses. Our goals are to: Determine oil impurities in pressed and solvent extracted oils, and modified oils prepared from Canola. Determine the impact of electric fields on unrefined vegetable oils produced by pressing and solvent extraction. Add model contaminants to highly refined triglycerides to study refining. Develop mathematical models to emulate oil contaminant behaviour in electric fields. Determine the impact of passing real unrefined oils through electric fields on oil properties and the presence of minor oil constituents. Develop modified refining protocols that minimize oil losses and maximize oil yield. Determine the potential to use electrostatic fields to concentrate phytochemicals from oil. Finally, the potential to utilize fine particulate absorbents with very high surface areas in refining will be evaluated. Knowledge gained regarding the behavior of particles in oils will aid in separating these materials from the oils. The final goal will be to develop a more conventional approach to refining with absorbents that is augmented by the use of electrostatic fields.***Canola oil is the largest such food dielectric product in Canada there are many other potential uses of the proposed advanced efficient oil refining strategies.