Low-Pressure Lipase-Catalyzed Production of Mono- and Diglycerides with and Without N-Butane and AOT Surfactant

The aim of this work is to report the production of mono- and diglycerides from olive oil at ambient condition and in pressurized n-butane as solvent medium. For this purpose, a commercial immobilized lipase (Novozym 435) was employed as catalyst and sodium (bis-2-ethyl-hexyl) sulfosuccinate (Aerosol-OT or AOT) as surfactant. The experiments were conducted in batch mode varying the temperature, pressure, and AOT concentration. Results showed that lipase-catalyzed glycerolysis either with compressed n-butane or in solvent-free system with AOT as surfactant might be a potential alternative route to conventional methods, as high contents of reaction products, especially monoglycerides (∼ 60 wt.%), were achieved at mild temperature and pressure with a relatively low solvent to substrates mass ratio (4:1) in short reaction times (2 h).