Cogeneration of biodiesel and nontoxic cottonseed meal from cottonseed processed by two-phase solvent extraction

In the present work, the preparation of biodiesel from cottonseed oil produced by two-phase solvent extraction (TSE) was studied. The experimental results of TSE process of cottonseed showed that the optimal extraction conditions were 30 g samples, 240 mL extraction solvent mixture and methanol/petroleum ether volume ratio 60:40, extraction temperature 30 deg. C, extraction time 30 min. Under the extraction conditions, the extraction rate of cottonseed oil could achieve 98.3%, the free fatty acid (FFA) and water contents of cottonseed oil were reduced to 0.20% and 0.037%, respectively, which met the requirement of alkali-catalyzed transesterification. The free gossypol (FG) content in cottonseed meal produced from two-phase solvent extraction could reduce to 0.014% which was far below the FAO standard. And the nontoxic cottonseed meal could be used as animal protein feed resources. After the TSE process of cottonseed, the investigations were carried out on transesterification of methanol with oil-petroleum ether solution coming from TSE process in the presence of sodium hydroxide (CaO) as the solid base catalyst. The influences of weight ratio of petroleum ether to cottonseed oil, reaction temperature, molar ratio of methanol to oil, alkali catalyst amount and reaction time on cottonseed oil conversion were respectively investigated by mono-factor experiments. The conversion of cottonseed oil into fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) could achieve 98.6% with 3:1 petroleum ether/oil weight ratio, 65 deg. C reaction temperature, 9:1 methanol/oil mole ratio, 4% (catalyst/oil weight ratio, w/w) solid base catalyst amount and 3 h reaction time. The properties of FAME product prepared from cottonseed oil produced by two-phase solvent extraction met the ASTM specifications for biodiesel.