Investigation of high-pressure phase transitions in vegetable oils by measuring phase velocity of longitudinal ultrasonic waves

Monitoring and studying the pressure effect on liquid properties are becoming increasingly important in food, chemical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry as well as in laboratory practice. Accurate thermodynamic data in liquids as a function of pressure are required for studies the structure of liquids as well as for various engineering applications. Direct measurement of thermodynamic parameters is very difficult. The velocity of sound is related to many thermodynamic parameters and can be measured relatively simple. In this work the variation of sound velocity and isothermal compressibility with hydrostatic pressure for triolein is evaluated up to 650 MPa. During the measurement we stated the phase transformation of triolein and the presence of the hysteresis of the dependence of sound velocity on pressure. To the authors´ knowledge, the measurement of the sound velocity of liquids under high pressure during the phase transition is the novelty. From the performed measurements it results that the dependence of sound velocity on pressure can be used to investigate phase transformations in natural oils.