Projeto de engenharia do processo de extração supercrítica de cafeína da erva mate

Abstract

The supercritical extraction emerged at the last decades as a green technology and as an alternative process to produce natural products and food. The process of supercritical extraction, using CO2 as a solvent, has been extensively studied, but there are fewer works about scale-up. Therefore, this work proposes to study the industrial supercritical fluid extraction of caffeine from yerba mate to produce decaffeinated yerba mate, an innovative product in the market, and caffeine, a product that has equal or even more value in the market than the main product. Design basis of this work are the experimental results of supercritical extraction in pilot scale and the appliance of a scale-up method based on the maintenance of the solvent mass flow and the raw-material mass flow proportion. Thus, process data sheet of main equipment were generated: extraction vessel, heat exchanger and high pressure pump. The maximum daily caffeine extraction capacity was estimated at two tons and the solvent mass flow rate of 22 t/h was obtained from the equation residence time of the solvent, maintaining constant the porosity of the 0.79 bed obtained in scale pilot. In addition, a process flow diagram was proposed for an industrial scale plant supercritical extraction of caffeine from yerba mate.