A Study of Jojoba Oil Extraction Based on a Fuzzy Logic Model

摘要

The physicochemical properties of jojoba oil extracted from the seeds harvested in a test plantation located in the Mesaoria Plain of Cyprus Island were found to be within the acceptable levels according to the Jojoba Export Council (IJEC) specifications. The product oil has already been commercialized. In case of a possible jojoba agriculture and industry in the region the optimum oil extraction parameters for maximum oil yield were examined. In the present study a fuzzy logic (FL) model and a multilinear regression model (MLR) for the prediction of jojoba oil yield was developed for the cases where the optimum conditions could not be attained easily in practice. Seed size, seed humidity level, seed temperature and residual discharge opening of the expeller for oil extraction was considered as input parameters and oil yield as the output. The data collected from 27 experiments were used to construct the models. The proposed FL model achieved R² and RMSE values of 0.9751 and 1.5225 whereas the MLR model resulted in 0.8256 and 6.3528, respectively.