Sunflower seed hulls and meal are among the most abundant by-products of the food industry. They are an example of waste and, at the same time, a plentiful biomass that cannot be utilized directly in human and animal diets due to their hard digestibility and low nutritional value. Besides their main compounds—carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins—they possess valuable constituents such as vitamins, minerals, and especially phenolics that contribute to their antioxidant capacity. Numerous benefits can be retrieved from such by-products. Since sunflower meal and seed hulls are cheap renewable sources of beneficial substances, their potential in relation to the improvement in our daily life needs to be studied. This is the reason why, in recent years, there has been such a serious interest in their utilization and valorization towards the concept of a circular bio-based economy and process sustainability. This review aims to trace the potential applications and implementation of sunflower meal and hulls in the different fields of industry and environmental protection strategies.

Lactic acid (LA) is an important chemical with diverse applications in various industries. LA can be produced by the fermentation of different substrates by many microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, yeasts, and algae. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are generally accepted as the main producers of LA. A distinct characteristic of LAB is the complexity of the fermentation media. Distiller’s dried grains with solubles (DDGS), a by-product from bioethanol production, represent a promising substitute for costly sugars in the nutrition media for LA production. In the present paper, the possibility of using dilute acid DDGS hydrolysates as a substrate for LA fermentation was investigated. The influence of different factors (acid concentration, time, pressure, solid-to-liquid ratio) on the reducing sugars (RS) obtained was studied. Additional enzyme hydrolysis was carried out to increase RS content in the hydrolysates. LA production from hydrolysates without and with control of the pH during fermentation was monitored and compared with lactose as a substrate. Inhibition of the process was observed in both substrates in the absence of pH control which was overcome in the case of pH control. A mathematical model based on the Verhulst and Ludeking–Piret equations was proposed and tested, showing very good agreement with experimental data.

The present paper examines the performance of cubic equations of state (CEoSs) and semi-empirical density-based models in correlating the solubility in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO 2) of several solid compounds of interest to the food industry, namely 2-propenamide, bixin, β-carotene and C-tetramethylcalix[4]resorcinarene. The four target solutes are with increasing structural complexity and, are typically pure solids, at ambient or slightly elevated temperatures. The Soave-Kwong-Redlich (SRK) CEoS with the one-fluid van der Waals mixing rule was chosen as representative of the class of CEoSs, while the group of the density-based models includes Chrastil model, Kumar and Johnston model, Bartle et al. model, Méndez-Santiago and Teja model, Garlapati and Madras model, Nejad et al. model and Khansary et al. model. The results obtained reveal that the more recently advocated density-based models (Garlapati and Madras, Nejad et al. and Khansary et al. models) perform better than the other models with overall average absolute deviations, AARD %, of 6.3, 7.8 and 7.2 %, respectively. The 9.1% overall AARD for the SRK CEoS was considered satisfactory since it can be used as a reliable thermodynamic model to predict the solubility of any compound for which there are no sufficient experimental data available.