Authors
Title
Abstract
Natural lipids, rich in mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids, are basic components of food; they significantly impact the accurate functioning of human organism. Unfortunately, those lipids are characterized by instability owing to their high susceptibility to oxidation processes. Many treatment procedures are applied to eliminate those adverse changes. In spite of their many advantages, the currently used commercial antioxidants may arouse controversy attributed to the undesirable biological activity or low stability under the food processing conditions. Therefore, there are attempts at searching for new antioxidants that might be an alternative to the presently used antioxidants. The objective of the research study was to develop a method to synthesize long-chain alkyl esters of ferulic acid. The antioxidants produced were identified based on the results of spectroscopic investigations and elemental analysis. A thermal analysis of esters was performed, which comprised thermogravimetry (TG) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The results obtained were compared with the results obtained for the free ferulic acid and with data in the reference literature on commercial antioxidants. In the research study, the antioxidant activity of tetradecyl ferulate and of BHT were pre-compared.
Keywords
antioxidants, ferulic acid, long-chain alkyl esters of ferulic acid, thermal stability, synthetic antioxidants