IDTQ A NEW RESEARCH GROUP LOCATED IN CORDOBA, ARGENTINA: PHASE EQUILIBRIUM, EXTRACTION, PURIFICATION AND MODELLING CAPABILITIES

ALFONSINA ANDREATTA; JUAN MANUEL MILANESIO; RAQUEL MARTINI; MARÍA FERNANDA BARRERA VÁZQUEZ

Campinas

Workshop; Workshop on Supercritical Fluids and Energy (SFE´13); 2013

University of Campinas, Brazil; Virginia Tech, USA

IDTQ is a recently developed research group with a high potential and mainly focused on supercritical technology applied to the extraction of natural products and its use on human health and also applied to solve energy problems. Plants with important properties for human health accompany mankind from its origins. In spite of the great evolution of health sciences, still exist pathologies without a definitive cure or with therapies that cause undesirable effects. Within this frame it is necessary search new therapeutic agents. Traditional processes of extraction and purification of natural products are: pressing, hydro-distillation, steam stripping and liquid organic solvent extraction. These traditional methods require high residence time, big quantities of solvent and they present low selectivity.  New techniques such as the application of supercritical fluids[1], microwave assisted extraction [2-4], ultrasound[4-5] and pressurized water[6-7] are among the new methods used in the industrial field to recover the bioactive compounds presents in natural products. In this sense, we present different natural products that were used to test these new extraction methods. The recovery of anthraquinones from cegadera, tannin from grapeseed, catechins from green tea and different bioactive compounds were studied in our lab. To model the equilibrium of these mixtures the use of a group contribution approach is a logical choice. In this way a group-contribution with association equation of state GCA-EOS[8] was applied to represent phase equilibrium data on mixtures containing the compounds in study with different solvents in a high range of condition including supercritical conditions. The extension of the GCA-EoS model will allow to represent a large set of natural products with complex chemical structures, and to evaluate traditional and supercritical processes using the equation predictive capability.   References   [1] D.J. Miller, S.B. Hawthorne, J. Chem. Eng. Data 45 (2000) 315-318. [2] A. Navarrete Muñoz, Tesis Doctoral. Universidad de Valladolid. , 2010. [3] B.G. Terigar, S. Balasubramanian, C.M. Sabliov, M. Lima, D. Boldor, J. Food Eng. 104 (2011) 208-217. [4] S. Hemwimon, P. Pavasant, A. Shotipruk, Sep. Purif. Technol. 54 (2007) 44-50. [5] M. Dabiri, S. Salimi, A. Ghassempour, A. Rassouli, M. Talebi, J. Sep. Sci. 28 (2005) 387-396. [6] M.D. Luque de Castro, M.M. Jiménez-Carmona, V. Fernández-Pérez, Trends Analyt. Chem. 18 (1999) 708-716. [7] D.J. Miller, S.B. Hawthorne, A.M. Gizir, A.A. Clifford, J. Chem. Eng. Data 43 (1998) 1043-1047. [8] H.P. Gros, S. Bottini, E.A. Brignole, Fluid Phase Equilib. 116 (1996) 537-544.