Estudo sobre processos de extração e purificação de cafeína da erva-mate

Abstract

The caffeine market extracted from natural products is rising due to the increasing consumption of product that use caffeine as a raw material, therefore new ways to obtain caffeine are being studied. Drugs, cosmetic and energy drinks industries are example of industries that are growing and use caffeine in their process. Mate has caffeine up to 2% in mass in the leaves and it is considered as an alternative way to obtain caffeine. However, it is necessary to develop a technology able to extract and after that purify caffeine. Thus, this work aims to study four different extraction process: supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), modified electric field (MEF), high pressure processing (HPP) and infusion; and four purification methodologies: supercritical antisolvent (SAS), sublimation and recrystallization, fractionation by column chromatography and liquid-liquid extraction. To analysis the caffeine in all process HPLC were used. The results showed that all four technologies were able to extract caffeine from mate leaves, however the infusion extraction showed to be the most effective technique, extracting 1,78% mass of caffeine per mass of mate. SAS and fractionation by column chromatography showed the best result in terms of purity: 95.3% and 99.0%, respectively.