Supercritical fluid extraction from vegetable materials

Abstract

Supercritical fluid extraction is a typical example of a novel technology for the ecologically compatible production of natural substances of high industrial potential from renewable resources such as vegetable matrices that finds extended industrial application. The present review offers an extended enumeration of extracted plant materials, discusses the mathematical modelling of the process, and advocates a choice for the appropriate model that is based on characteristic times of individual extraction steps. Finally, the attention is focussed on the elements of a thermodynamic modelling framework designed to predict and model robustly and efficiently the complex phase equilibria of the systems solute plus supercritical fluid.