Development of an innovative strategy capable of describing the large-scale extraction of tucumã-of-Pará oil (Astrocaryum vulgare Mart.) using supercritical CO2 as solvent

Supercritical fluid extraction is innovative, environmentally friendly, efficient, and has unique features that are extremely useful in scale-up development. Despite its important role in the vegetable oil production chain, data on the scale-up of tucumã-of-Pará oil production remains scarce. Therefore, two new equations were developed following an innovative strategy which combines the Single Particle Model, the mass conservation principle, and the principle of the slope angle constancy between the overall extraction curves obtained on small scale and on large scale as a function of time that we expect will be amenable to a range of vegetable matrix. The predicted values obtained by those new equations have been compare favorably to the experimental data, since those equations enable the prediction of kinetic behavior and maintained the fatty acids composition at any extraction dimension.