Kinetics of Solvent-Free Lipase-Catalyzed Production of Monoacylglycerols from Olive Oil in Aerosol-OT Surfactant

This work reports a kinetic study of monoacylglycerols production from olive oil in a solvent-free system using a commercial lipase in the presence of surfactant. For this purpose, a commercial immobilized lipase (Novozym 435) was employed as catalyst and sodium (bis-2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate (Aerosol-OT or AOT) as surfactant. The experiments were performed in batch mode, recording the reaction kinetics over temperature range of 40−80 °C, enzyme concentration of 1−10 wt %, AOT addition of 5−20 wt %, and glycerol to oil molar ratio of 1:1−1:3. Results showed that lipase-catalyzed glycerolysis in a solvent-free system with the addition of AOT surfactant might be a promising route, as high reaction conversions to monoacylglycerols, greater than 70%, were achieved at mild temperatures and relatively low enzyme concentrations (∼5−7.5 wt %) in short reaction times (1 h).