Experimental Design Methodology Applied to Bleaching of Palm Oil Using Local Clay
Nwabanne, J.T; Ekwu, F. C

Abstract
In the present work, response surface methodology was used to study the optimization of bleaching of palm oil using local clay. Chemical activation method which employed phosphoric acid was used for the preparation of the clay. Box Wilson experimental design was employed to correlate the bleaching parameters (temperature, time and dosage of clay) to the percentage palm oil bleached. The result showed that the optimum condition for the bleaching process was temperature of 1000C, time of 30 min and dosage of 2.4g of clay which resulted in 99.17% bleaching of the palm oil. The experimental result was in agreement with the model prediction. Quadratic polynomial equation was developed for proper process parametric study in order to achieve optimal performance. The study has shown that the clay is a good adsorbent for the bleaching of palm oil.

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