Enhanced Solvent Extraction (ESE).
Supercritical Carbon dioxide is a great solvent for apolar substances. Our compressed water and carbon dioxide extraction system allows the extraction of polar substances. The action of carbon dioxide is to Permeate Matrices, coadiuvating water’s solvent action. This system, experimented on green coffee, allowed its decaffeination and the total recovery of caffeine from the separators.
These new generation systems are different from traditional one. They need two high pressure pumps working at the same pressure, one for CO2 the other for H2O.
Among several supercritical fluids carbon dioxide is usually promoted as a green solvent. Supercritical fluid extraction of ethanol from the aqueous solutions produced in biochemical processes has several advantages over conventional separation methods; over the years there have been many reports on the separation process using CO2 and/or the required phase equilibria data for the carbon dioxide + water + ethanol system at elevated pressures.
Supercritical CO2 has been also used to extract components from hydro-alcoholic mixtures. On the other hand, ethanol aqueous solutions are used as solvents of different substrates in particle design using supercritical CO2.
Mixtures of carbon dioxide and ethanol + water at 308.15 K show an increasingly exothermic behavior when the pressure is lowered from 8.5 to 7.5 MPa.
High pressure extractions of polar compounds using supercritical CO2 followed by Enhanced Solvent Extraction (ESE) with diverse CO2/ethanol/H2O solvent mixtures (0–90%, 0.5–100%, 0–95%, v/v/v), at 313 K and 21 MPa, shows that this ESE solvent mixtures has a substantial effect on extracts yield and composition.
With step sequential extraction, CO2 only followed by CO2 + EtOH and finally CO2 + H2O shows different kind of fractionated extracts. Removing fat before performing CO2 + EtOH +H2O, the process gives improved results.