Supercritical CO2 Extraction of Extracted Oil from Pistacia lentiscus L.: Mathematical Modeling, Economic Evaluation and Scale-Up

Abstract

In this study, the extracted oil of Pistacia lentiscus L. the Tunis region was extracted using supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) extraction containing different major components in the oil such as α-pinene (32%) and terpinene-4-ol (13%). The investigation of the effect of different variables on the extraction yield with 5% level of confidence interval showed that the CO2 pressure was the main significant variable to influence the oil yield. In order to better understand the phenomena, three parameters were considered to adjust all parameters of broken and intact cell (BIC) model: grinding efficiency (G), the internal mass transfer parameter ( k S a 0 ), and the external mass transfer parameter ( k f a 0 ), which were estimated by experimental extraction curves to calculate the diffusion coefficient. From an economic point of view, we found out that the high cost of production of the extracted oil was due to the low mass of extracted oil obtained from this type of plant.