This technology involves adding a microbial enzyme catalyst to a mixture of rice bran oil and anhydrous alcohol to produce fatty acid alkyl esters via alcoholysis. After removing free fatty acids and glycerol, the mixture undergoes vacuum fractional distillation using a short-path distillation (SPD) unit to concentrate bioactive substances. It is characterized by the simultaneous concentration of tocopherol, gamma-oryzanol, policosanol, and phytosterols in a single process.
Obtaining high-purity bioactive substances from rice bran oil requires transesterification. Common alkali-catalyzed methods suffer from low yields due to emulsification and fatty acid soap byproducts, while acid-catalyzed methods require excessive catalyst and can degrade active ingredients during high-temperature reactions. Methods involving organic solvent precipitation of sterols followed by molecular distillation are cumbersome due to the solvent removal process, and supercritical extraction is time-consuming, expensive, and limited by the difficulty of completely separating bioactive substances from ethyl esters.
This technology uses lipases from Candida, Rhizopus, Mucor, Aspergillus, and Pseudomonas species as catalysts to produce esters without soap byproducts. It utilizes a short-path distillation unit, where the short distance between the evaporation and condensation surfaces limits thermal contact to just a few seconds, minimizing damage to heat- and oxidation-sensitive components. By adjusting the distillation temperature to the vacuum level, four components are concentrated from several to over ten times compared to the raw material, with concentrates analyzed via HPLC, GC, and spectrophotometry. Applicable to producing natural vitamin E and gamma-oryzanol, cholesterol-management health supplements, and recovering high-value byproducts from rice bran oil refining, it enables the high-purity extraction of multiple functional ingredients from low-cost rice bran.
This invention was developed with support from the Rural Development Administration for the extraction, concentration, and materialization of bioactive substances from embryo-containing brown rice oil.
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