Scale-up issues and cost of manufacturing bioactive compounds by supercritical fluid extraction and ultrasound assisted extraction

Abstract

Because of the today’s pursuit for healthy products, the production of vegetable extracts by supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and ultrasound assisted extraction (UAE) is a field of industrial interest. Nonetheless, the lack of information on scale-up of these technologies to the industrial level and the relatively high investment associated with emergent extraction processes is responsible for the elimination of these technologies at the very early stages of process design, that is, during the selection of the extraction process. In order to avoid this prejudice, a preliminary analysis of the cost of manufacturing (COM) should be conducted with a minimum of experimental information, possibly gathered from the literature. If this tool is available to process design engineers, the various extraction techniques can be analyzed without any high investment bias. Thus, a simple method to estimate the COM of extracts by SFE and UAE is needed. In this chapter, rapid methods to estimate the COM of extracts obtained by these techniques are presented. The information required to perform such analysis is discussed based on scale-up issues. A compilation of the published data on the scale-up and COM of SFE and UAE processes is presented.