Chemical characterization and phase behaviour of grape seed oil in compressed carbon dioxide and ethanol as co-solvent

The aim of this work is to report phase equilibrium experimental results for the systems grape oil/carbon dioxide and (grape oil/carbon dioxide + ethanol). The oil was obtained by supercritical extraction from the grape seed residue from wine production. The static synthetic method using a variable-volume view cell was employed for obtaining the experimental bubble and dew (cloud) points transition data over the temperature range of (313.15 to 343.15) K and pressures up to 20.6 MPa. The experiments were carried out using (ethanol + CO2) overall mass fractions ranging from 0.50 to 0.99, keeping a fixed ethanol to carbon dioxide molar ratio at 1:3. Results indicate the existence of complex phase behaviour for all temperatures investigated with the occurrence of vapour–liquid, liquid–liquid and vapour–liquid–liquid phase transitions observed.