Extraction and Characterisation of Oil from Cattle Brain for Production of Fat Liquor

Extraction of oil from plants and animals’ source for production of fat liqour to render the leather soft by a sort of lubricating the fibres after tanning is being a practice for long. However, the oils and fats that were formerly used almost exclusively are now becoming scarce and expensive, thus there are need to source for alternative and readily available /environmentally friendly agents for this purpose of imparting the physical properties of leather. In this research extraction and characterization of oil from cattle brain was carried out, to ascertained its suitability for production of fat liquor. This was done on dried and fresh sample of cattle brain collected from Zango abattoir in Zaria metropolis, using Soxhlet extraction method and Physicochemical parameters method of America Oil Chemists Society (AOCS) and Association of Official Analytical Chemists (A.O.A.C), the results such as: percentage yield (44.24% and 39.52%); iodine value(11.24 mgI2/g and 65.99 mgI2/g); saponification value (126.23 mgKOH/g and 131.83 mgKOH/g) ; acid value (5.6 mgKOH/g and 6.73 mgKOH/g); ester value (120.62 mgKOH/g and 125.1 mgKOH/g); peroxide value (31.00 mEq/kg and 42.00  mEq/kg) and specific gravity (0.9 g/cm3 and 0.89 g/cm3) were obtained for dried and fresh cattle-brain oil respectively. The fresh cattle-brain oil, having shown good oil quality for fatliquor on the account of animal based was therefore, recommended for production of fatliqour