(381bc) Enriching Trace Bioactive Compound and Isolation of Pesticides from Natural Materials Using Scalable Supercritical CO2 Continuous Countercurrent Extraction

Supercritical CO2 extraction is a green and sustainable technology and has been applied in the food and pharmaceutical industry. In this paper, we presented a study on enriching trace bioactive compound and isolation of pesticides from palm oil and spice oleoresins, respectively, using supercritical CO2 technology. Natural Beta-Carotene is an antioxidant and precursor of vitamin A, which has many benefits to human beings, such as it can reduce the risk of cancer, enhance immunity, and prevent night blindness, etc. Crude palm oil is the primary source of Natural Beta-Carotene, from which many methods have been reported to extract Beta-Carotene. At present, transesterification followed by distillation is a main method, which involves using a huge volume of organic solvent, and the chemical structure of palm oil was changed. In this work, a fractional pilot column with the height of 6 m and diameter of 50 mm, filled with packing, was manufactured and a continuous countercurrent supercritical CO2 extraction-distillation process was developed to enriching beta-carotene from crude palm oil directly. The influence of the process parameters (pressure, temperature, CO2, and feeding ratio) on the Beta-Carotene content was investigated. At the optimum conditions, the beta-carotene content could be enriched to 40 times and reached to 2% from 0.05% after two cycles. It is not necessary to make transesterification of palm oil, keeping its original form, and the process is simple. Also, we carried out a study on removing pesticides from capsicum oleoresin extracted from chilly. The results indicated the pesticides content could be reduced from the original PPM level to PPB level, which is expected to have wide application in removing toxic components from spice oleoresins. In conclusion, this approach can find wide applications in enriching and purifying compositions used in nutraceutical, pharmaceutical & cosmetic fields, etc.

Keywords: supercritical CO2 countercurrent extraction; enriching; isolation; beta-carotene; pesticides; spice oleoresins