Class: BE-210
Group: R4
Members: Anastasios Argeros, Dan Pincus, Zachary Shinar, Andrea Sultenfuss
Date: April 30, 1998
Full Text

Abstract:
To determine a relationship between heat of combustion and degree of saturation, olive oil (regular and extra virgin), canola oil, and soybean oil were combusted using a non-adiabatic Parr bomb calorimeter. The heat of combustion was expected to increase with the degree of saturation. According to the level of saturation, olive oil was expected to have the greatest heat of combustion, followed by canola oil, and then soybean oil. The experimental data showed that the differences among heats of combustion of the oils were insignificant. The observed average heats of combustion of olive oil are 39.31 + 0.709 kJ/g (regular) and 40.98 + 0.145 kJ/g (extra virgin). The average heats of combustion for canola oil and soybean oil are 41.45 + 0.471 kJ/g and 40.81 + 0.325 kJ/g, respectively. Though the standard deviation for each set of trials is below 2% of the heat of combustion, the ranges of each set overlap one another. Nevertheless, the experimental data are within the standard deviation of other data obtained using similar equipment and procedure. The insignificance of the data can be explained by the small variance in the heats of combustion of the constituent fatty acids. Since the deviation of the heats of combustion of the fatty acids is only 0.6% while the deviation in the experimental results is 0.9%, no significant difference should be expected from our data. The differences in the heats of combustion of the oils due to saturation are too small to detect using the resources available. A final point of analysis concerns the nutritional labels used by the FDA. Our data was 13.2% lower than the caloric value on nutritional labels. This is most likely explained by the FDA’s cessation to use bomb calorimetry and instead approximation the caloric content of the food from the ingredients.