The Use of a Eutectic Mixture of Olive Pomace Oil Fatty Amides to Easily Prepare Sulfated Amides Applied as Lime Soap Dispersants

Sulfated diethanolamides of fatty acids are known to be effective lime soap dispersing agents. However, their preparation from fatty acids via fatty amides requires the use of organic solvents due to the high viscosity of both fatty amides and sulfated fatty amides. This study shows that the preparation of sulfated fatty amides is relatively easy when using olive pomace oil as the raw material. The latter, is converted into sulfated fatty amides by performing the following steps: saponification, hydrolysis, esterification, amidation, and sulfation. In the final step, the mixture obtained has sufficient fluidity, due to its high linoleic acid amide content, to obviate the use of organic solvents, as usually suggested in the literature. Characterization of the product was carried out by chemical analyses, FTIR, ¹³C NMR, GC, and HPLC. It was shown that the yield of the amidation reaction is about 80%, and that of the sulfation reaction can exceed 100% against the pure amide (more than one sulfate group could be linked to one amide molecule). On the other hand, the Borghetty test showed that the product is an effective dispersant with a lime soap dispersing power equal to five.