A kinetic study of lipase-catalyzed alcoholysis of palm kernel oil

The use of lipases as biocatalysts in interesterification reactions has been the object of growing interest, owing to the importance of esters as emulsifiers, intermediates to produce oleochemicals, and fuel alternatives. We consider in this article a kinetic study of lipase-catalyzed alcoholysis of palm kernel oil, using n-hexane as the solvent. In a first step the ester production was maximized by using a Taguchi design, and then an empirical model was built to determine the influence of the process variables. Taking into account the results obtained in the first step, we performed a kinetic study and developed a simple model for this system.