Solvent extraction of oil from three cultivars of Nigerian mango seed kernel: process modeling, GA - optimization, nonlinear kinetics and comparative characterization.

This work investigated the physicochemical and instrumental characterization of oil optimally extracted from three species of mango kernels (Alphonso, Glenn and Fazli) by highlighting their isolated qualities. The effect of temperature (40-58 °C), dosage (0.0033-0.0267 g/mL) and time (0-360 min) was varied at the course of experiment. It was observed that while temperature increment had a corresponding positive impact on mango kernel oil extraction efficiency, the influence of dosage produced a quadratic effect, reaching maximum efficiency at 0.017 g/mL, beyond which an undesirable decline was recorded. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) of process factors gave an F-value of > 80.5 for temperature, indicating that temperature was the most important parameter that influenced the extraction process, while kernel dosage having F-value < 20 was the least influential process parameter. Process optimization by response surface methodology coupled genetic algorithm (RSM-GA) gave an optimum validation yield of 13.62%, 14.7% and 16.1% for Fazli, Glenn...