Supercritical anti solvent precipitation of carotenoids from an emulsion

FACUNDO MATTEA; ÁNGEL MARTÍN; CRISTINA AZPELETA; ALBA SERNA; MARÍA JOSÉ COCERO

Barcelona

Congreso; 11th European Meeting on Supercritical Fluids. New Per- spectives in Supercritical Fluids: Nanoscience, Materials and Processing; 2008

ICMAB-CSIC; MATGAS

Carotenoids have been already precipitated with the aid of supercritical fluids with successful results. The use of these carotenoids in most industrial or pharmaceutical processes requires an improvement on their dissolution rate in water, thus the particle size must be lowered to the submicro or nano size. In this work the feasibility of the supercritical anti-solvent (SAS) process to obtain ß- carotene particles from an o/w emulsion consisting in: ß-carotene – dichloromethane solution as the dispersed phase and water as the continuous phase is studied. First, in order to prepare the emulsion two different surfactants were used: a combination of Span 20 and Tween 20 and a modified non-ionic starch, the o/w ratio was varied from 15% to 50%. The mean droplet size of most of the emulsion was below one micrometer. Afterwards the supercritical antisolvent process was applied to the system and the resulting suspension was analyzed. The concentration of dichloromethane in the product and the particle size distribution were measured. Also the stability of the emulsion was measured at three different temperatures and pressures to ensure the precipitation of the particles inside the droplets. The particles of ß-carotene were measured by means of dynamic light scattering techniques and their mean diameter was between 200 and 600 nm.