Separation Technology of Vitamin E from Rice Bran Oil

Abstract

Natural vitamin E (tocopherol and tocotrienol) is separated from byproduct of vegetable oil refining by conventional process with mainly multistep molecular distillation. However, its recovery yield and purity are low due to poor thermal stability and separation selectivity, which causes high production cost. In order to overcome these problems, many separation processes under mild conditions, such as supercritical CO₂ extraction and adsorption/desorption, has been proposed. These processes have been applied to the separation of tocotrienol from distillate from rice bran or palm oils.