Palm oil, derived from Elaeis guineensis, is a critical component of the global edible oil and industrial fat market. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the sustainability of the palm oil chain, focusing on industrial applications, environmental implications, and economic sustainability. The processing of palm oil, from fruit pulp to refined oil, is detailed, highlighting the importance of refining in maintaining quality and extending application ranges. While palm oil offers health benefits because of its rich fatty acid composition and antioxidant properties, its production poses significant environmental challenges. This review underscores ongoing efforts to balance technological and culinary demands with environmental stewardship and sustainable economic growth. Emerging trends, including interspecific hybrids such as E. guineensis and E. oleifera, are discussed for their potential to increase sustainability and productivity.

Pequi is a natural source of bioactive compounds with wide versatility for fresh or processed fruit consumption, but it is still little explored economically. Functional foods are the subject of diverse scientific research since, in addition to being nourishing, they contain bioactive compounds capable of promoting several benefits to the human body. Pequi is a fruit species native to the Brazilian Cerrado, which is rich in oil and has components with a high nutritional value, such as unsaturated fatty acids (omega-3, omega-6, EPA, and DHA), antioxidants (carotenoids and phenolic compounds), and vitamins. Therefore, the present narrative review aims to compile and critically evaluate the methods used to extract oil from the pulp and almonds of pequi and describes the carotenoid separation from the oil because carotenoids are natural pigments of great interest in the pharmaceutical and food industries. It is emphasized that the main challenges linked to bioactive compound extraction are their susceptibility to degradation in the processing and storage stages of pequi and its derived products.

It is undoubted that, with industrial development, the thermophysical characterization of materials and substances, among other reasons, maximizes the performance of equipment and the efficiency of the most diverse unit operations. In these studies, related to thermal diffusivity, a property that is directly related to the heat transfer between materials, are increasingly recurrent. A simple and effective apparatus for estimating thermal diffusivity in an experimental and direct way was developed by Dickerson (1965), and since then it has been widely used in research related to this topic. However, considering that experimentally, a series of data is obtained related, for example, to the dimensions of the equipment, as well as the time values, and efficiently in order to obtain results that make it possible to infer as much information about the object of study as possible. Therefore, with this proposed work, the use of electronic spreadsheets, calculated for Excel data processing, from the experimental Microsoft software obtained by the apparatus. The functionality of the physical spreadsheets was verified through the electronic calculation resolution, in the manual form and in the demonstration of efficiency and agility of the computational method, in addition to the characterization of the potential for several materials or substances.