Processing of pomegranate seed waste and mass transfer studies of extraction of pomegranate seed oil.

In this manuscript, an attempt has been made to study the effect of particle size, time, and temperature
on the extraction of pomegranate seed oil (PSO) with hexane. Pomegranate seed powder
fraction (9XXX) provided the highest yield of PSO than others, yielding 39% (w/v) oil extracted at
room temperature (28–30 8C, 8 hr). The composition of oil extracted with different methods has
been determined with a primary focus on the content of punicic acid (PA). Hexane extracted 9XXX
fraction was found to be the best solvent for the high PA in PSO extraction at 28–30 8C. FT-IR
showed that there are no unusual functional groups in the spectra in all extraction conditions. The
method of principal component analysis (PCA) has been studied for individual fatty acids to the
total variability of principal components. The mass transfer studies on extraction initially followed
zero order rate up to 10 min, followed by first order rate transfer.
Practical applications
Pomegranate seeds are one of the major components of the marc. The pomegranate seed oil
(PSO) is characterized by the presence of high concentration of punicic acid, which possesses various
health beneficial properties, like antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, etc. The studies
carried out enable to fractionate pomegranate seed powder into one of the fractions which yields
not only the high content of oil at room temperature but also high content of punicic acid.