Supercritical Fluid Technologies has introduced a pilot scale supercritical extractor for the processing of natural products.
The SFT-NPX-10 is designed to simplify extraction for a wide variety of natural products utilising safe, efficient carbon dioxide. It may be used to facilitate the transition from laboratory scale equipment to large production scale systems.
Using supercritical CO2 to perform extractions on botanicals, herbs, spices and other natural product materials has significant benefits over the use of traditional liquid solvents.
While the supercritical fluid possesses many of the same characteristics of a liquid solvent, it adds the benefits of high diffusivity and ’pressure tunable’ solvency power.
Additionally, no residual solvents are in either the extract or remaining biomass.
There is no need to perform a distillation step since, upon dropping pressure, the CO2 becomes a gas. The extracted material is pure and in its natural state.
The CO2 may be safely vented or optionally recycled for greater efficiency. Since the solvency power of the fluid is pressure dependent, it is possible to ’fractionate’ to obtain multiple compositions from a single raw material.
This makes practical some separations that are difficult or impossible to do with traditional liquid solvent and distillation processing.
The SFT-NPX-10 is designed to perform supercritical fluid extractions in processing vessels of 20 litre capacity and below with single or dual separators, using a Coriolis mass flow meter to guarantee precise mass flow measurement.
A pneumatic CO2 pump with an integral pre-chiller is used to maximise pumping efficiency. Additional options include a programmable controller for automated regulation of pressure, temperature and process cycles. A carbon dioxide recycle option is also available.
