Stability of ethyl esters from soybean oil exposed to high temperatures in supercritical ethanol

It is well known that during the supercritical alcoholysis of vegetable oils the main transesterification reaction occurs simultaneously to several decomposition phenomena, In order to separately study the effect of such phenomena, pure ethyl esters from soybean oil (SBOEE) were mixed with ethanol at a molar ratio 40:3 (ethanol:SBOEE) and exposed for different periods to supercritical conditions in a continuous system, at 20 MPa and different temperatures from 250 to 375 °C. It was experimentally observed that the ester content of the processed samples were lower than that corresponding to the original SBOEE, indicating the occurrence of decomposition processes, which were more important as the temperature increased and the flow rate diminished. The content of polyunsaturated esters of the treated SBOEE was lower than that of the starting mixture, showing that the decomposition rate was highly dependent on the nature and instauration degree of the alkyl chain.