20, 5 West and Feliciano: Extraction of Copra Cake 511 
in operation in the United States where they are extracting 
various oil seeds and oil cakes, such as coconut, cottonseed, 
corn, castor beans, palm kernels, etc. Of the solvents which 
have been tried Shrader' states that benzene and trichlor 
ethylene appear to give the best results. In the Philippines all 
companies, with one exception, use the pressure process. Re- 
cently an extraction plant was built, but we have been unable to 
obtain any data concerning its products. 
One of the principal duties of the oil chemist in a coconut-oil 
mill is to determine the amount of oil remaining in the copra 
cake, and usually many analyses are made during the day. The 
standard method employed for this purpose is to extract the copra 
cake with ether, using the well-known Soxhlet apparatus. Since 
ether is a very volatile and inflammable liquid and somewhat 
troublesome to handle in an oil-mill laboratory in a warm tropical 
country, it was thought that possibly some other, more suitable 
solvent might be used in place of ether. 
The object of the present investigation is to determine the 
comparative results obtained by ee copra cake with 
various solvents. 
SAMPLE 
The samples of copra cake used in this investigation were 
obtained from one of the largest coconut-oil mills in Manila. 
We used average samples of both expeller and hydraulic cakes. 
The cakes were broken up into rather fine pieces and quartered 
twice after which they were powdered in mortars and sieved 
until sufficiently fine for the entire sample to pass a 50-mesh 
screen. The powdered sample was then heated in an air bath 
about ten minutes at 80°. Analysis of these cakes gave the re- 
sults recorded in Table 2. 
TABLE 2.—Analyses of copra cake." 
| Expeller| Hydrau- 
Constants. cake. | lic cake. 
Per cont.| Per cent. | 
SL Ee RR ay ENC Fe: See MaESe Ne uy ERS OS An FRR Se cares ear 4.76 7.51 | 
Brailes Ri ee eee cade ee eee 6.84 7.47 
PLOOE ON SC CoB) aie ee a ee oc ed 20.94; 20.71 
Cig Ga 5 ee ee ae ee es ee a 8.40 7.29 
Wii Dahie palin Gite Shh Y eo chicane an sweuninithmine capepaae 5.05 | 5.28 
*Analyses made by F, Agcaoili and W. Salvador, Bureau of Science, 
* Shrader, J. H., Chem. Met. Eng. 25 (1921) 94. 
