Tocotrienols Concentration Using Packed Column Supercritical Fluid

Palm oil is the richest source of natural tocotrienols. Tocols in palm consists of both tocopherols and tocotrienol in the amount between 600 ppm-1,000 ppm in crude palm oil. Both tocopherols and tocotrienols have been found to be beneficial to health with the tocotrienols exhibit more powerful antioxidant and anti-cancer power than the tocopherols. Effort has been made to extract and recover the valuable tocols from palm oil, where they are being made into food fortifier, nutritional supplements or as ingredients in cosmetics formulations. This paper reports on the application of supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) for such purpose. The process and feasibility of extraction and recovery of tocols from palm using SFC are reported whereby it was found that the SFC is able to purify the palm tocols in consistent purity and production rate with no effect on the processing time. Tocols with 20% purity were obtained in one chromatographic step with SFC, using carbon dioxide as the mobile phase and ethanol as modifier at 600°C and 190 bars with specific production rate between 16-31 g.kg-1 min. The purity of the end product and production rate however, can be greatly enhanced with the introduction of a pre-treatment step, prior to the purification by SFC. The purity of the end product increased by more than three folds with the introduction of the pre-treatment step. The purity and specific production rate of the tocols obtained from pre-treated palm oil were 70% and 446.8-844.6 g.kg-1 min respectively.