Glycerol; acts as a solvent for flavors and food colors and also in pharma and medical industries
Glycerol is also known as glycerine or glycerin, it is a simple polyol component which has no color, no taste. It is a viscous fluid which tastes sweet and is also non-toxic. The glycerol backbone is mostly found in lipids which are called as glycerides. Owing to have antimicrobial and antiviral methods it is vastly employed in food and drug administration approval injury and burn therapy. It is mostly utilized in bacterial medium culture. It can also be employed as an efficient marker to know and observe liver disease. It is vastly utilized as a sweetener in the food industry and also acts a humectant in pharma formulations, due to the involvement of three hydroxyl groups. Glycerol get mixed with water and is very hygroscopic in the basic nature.
Glycerol is usually derived from the plants and animal sources where it takes place in triglycerides, esters of the glycerol with the long chains of the carboxylic acid. The saponification process or transesterification of the triglycerides gives glycerol and also the fatty acid derivatives. Triglycerides can also be saponified with sodium hydroxide to obtain glycerol and fatty sodium soap or salt. Typical source of plant involve soybeans or the palm. And animal obtained tallow is other source. Nearly 950,000 tons annually are created in the US and Europe. Glycerol from the form of triglycerides are produced or manufactured on a large scale however, the crude items obtained from it is a varied quality product which is inexpensive. It can also be filtered and purified however, the filtration process would be costly.
Often, glycerol is burnt so that it could produce some energy, anyhow it do not liberate so much of heat or the value of released heat is very less. Crude glycerol from the process of hydrolysis from triglyceride can be filtered by using the activated carbon to eliminate organic impurities, alkali to eradicate unreacted esters of glycerol and also exchange of the ions take place so as to eliminate the salts. One can get high and pure form of glycerol by multiple distillation process which needs a vacuum chamber for its high boiling point. Anyhow, not so effective or budget friendly glycerol can be obtained by various forms of propene. For obtaining glycerol in this method epichlorohydrin process is very essential. It includes the process of chlorination of propylene which further would give allyl chloride.
Glycerol is sometimes regarded as an unimportant product at the time of manufacturing of biodiesel from the fats as the process is non-economical, due to the more distribution, efforts are being transformed to change glycerol to synthetic precursors like acrolein. There are several places where glycerol is widely used such as food industry, in F&B glycerol acts as a solvent and also acts as a preservative in foods. It is sometimes utilized as a filler in low-fat foods such as cookies and also as a thickening agent in the alcohols. Glycerol and water are utilized to store several types of plant leaves. Glycerol is also used in medical industry and also for personal care. It is also used in some of the niche sectors such as cine industry, fuel combustion and also in ultrasonic couplant.