PURPOSE

The purpose of this experiment is to examine the working principles of a full-size extractor by extracting oil from peanuts with the aid of dicloromethane.

INTRODUCTION

Definition:

Leaching is the removal of a soluble fraction, in the form of a solution, from an insoluble, permeable solid phase with which it is associated. The separation usually involves selective dissolution, with or without diffusion, but in the extreme case of simple washing it consists merely of the displacement (with some mixing) of one interstitial liquid by another with which it is miscible. The soluble constituent may be solid or liquid; and it may be incorporated within, chemically combined with, adsorbed upon, or held mechanically in the pore structure of the insoluble material. The insoluble solid may be massive and porous; more often it is particulate, and the particles may be openly porous, cellular with selectively permeable cell walls, or surface-activated. It is common practice to exclude from consideration as leaching the elution of surface-adsorbed solute. This process is treated instead as a special case of the reverse operation, adsorption. Also usually excluded is the washing of filter cakes, whether in situ or by reslurrying and refiltration. Because of its variety of applications and its importance to several ancient industries, leaching is known by a number of other names. Among those encountered in chemical engineering practice are extraction, solid-liquid extraction, lixiviation, percolation, infusion, washing, and decantation settling. The stream of solids being leached and the accompanying liquid is known as the underflow; in hydrometallurgy practice it is called pulp. The solid content of the stream is sometimes called marc (particularly by oil seed processors). The stream of liquid containing the leached solute is the overflow. As it leaves the leaching process it has several optional names: extract, solution, lixiviate, leachate, or miscella. Mechanism The mechanism of leaching may involve simple physical solution or dissolution made possible by chemical reaction. The rate of transport of solvent into the mass to be leached, or of soluble fraction into the solvent, or of extract solution out of the insoluble material, or some combination of these rates may be significant. A membranous resistance may be involved. A chemical-reaction rate may also affect the rate of leaching. Inasmuch as the overflow and underflow streams are not immiscible phases but streams based on the same solvent, the concept of equilibrium for leaching is not the one applied in other mass-transfer separations.

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