Avaliação da influência da natureza da matriz sólida sobre a extração supercrítica de óleos vegetais

Abstract

The extraction of substances from solid substrates both low and high pressures involves at least two phases, a solid and another fluid. The content of the solute in each phase is expressed in terms of the volume of phase and / or volume of solvent. Then, by modeling the interfacial mass transfer it requires a partition coefficient. In general, the simplest way to address this problem is to model the phases separately. The mechanism predominant mass transfer can vary from system to system. For some substrates higher resistance may be in the solid phase and for others it is in the fluid phase. As the interface concentrations for each phase are represented by different variable, phases have to be modeled separately. However, depending on the system, there may be a transfer mechanism predominated over the other, and many effects can be discarded for simplification of the model. The utilization of simpler mathematical models requires a combination of variables for definition of parameters that can represent the phenomenon. In this work the extraction curves were fitted to a model which describes the interfacial mass transfer like a first order kinetics, since the constant of the extraction rate is the unique adjustment parameter. It has been proposed that the adjustment parameter depends on the solubility of solute in the supercritical solvent and on the solid substratum characteristics. To avail that, extraction experiments with babaçu, powder açaí and pupunha pulp using super-critic carbon dioxide at 20, 25 and 30 MPa and temperature of 50°C have been carried out. The results showed that the experimental data fit well to a model with a constant characteristic of each material, with values 4.1983 x 10-5 m/kg∙s to babaçu, 4.2258 x 10-5 m/kg∙s to pupunha pulp, to 10-5 m/kg∙s to powder açaí.