Camellia oil is an edible health oil with high medicinal value. While phospholipids, peroxides, and free fatty acids are present in unrefined camellia virgin oil (CVO), which has a negative impact on the quality characteristics and storage stability. This paper is to investigate the testing effects of transmembrane pressure and temperature on the membrane flux and degumming (the removal of colloidal substances from crude oil and which is mainly phospholipids) to determine the optimum process parameters for the purification of CVO. On this basis, the effects of purification treatments applied by using a membrane system with membranes of different pore sizes (200, 140, 20, 15, and 10 nm) on CVO were tested. The results indicate that the purification treatments of ceramic membrane on CVO reduced the contents of phospholipids (87.0% reduction), peroxides (29.2% reduction), and free fatty acids (16.2% reduction) at a transmembrane pressure of 0.4 MPa and temperature of 60 °C. At the same time, these treatments did not significantly alter the fatty acid composition. Thus, ceramic membranes have the potential for the purification of camellia oil, which could be an effective way to achieve the purification of camellia oil.
Keywords: camellia oil; ceramic membrane; membrane flux; physicochemical properties.