RESEARCH ARTICLE


Co-Precipitation of Beta-Carotene and Bio-Polymer Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide as Antisolvent



Elton Franceschi*, 1, Alana de Cezaro2, Sandra R. S. Ferreira3, Marcos H. Kunita4, Edvani C. Muniz4, Adley F. Rubira4, J. Vladimir Oliveira2
1 Instituto de Tecnologia e Pesquisa-ITP, Programa de Mestrado em Engenharia de Processos PEP/UNIT, Campus Farolândia, Av. Murilo Dantas, 300, Aracaju, SE, 49032-490, Brazil
2 Department of Food Engineering, URI - Campus de Erechim, Av. Sete de Setembro, 1621, Erechim, RS 99700-000, Brazil
3 EQA-CTC/UFSC, Chemical Engineering and Food Engineering Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, C.P. 476, CEP 88040-900, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil
3 Department of Chemistry, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Av. Colombo 5790, 87020-900, Maringá, PR, Brazil

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2010
Volume: 4
First Page: 11
Last Page: 20
Publisher ID: TOCENGJ-4-11
DOI: 10.2174/1874123101004010011

Article History:

Received Date: 01/09/2009
Revision Received Date: 29/10/2009
Acceptance Date: 08/12/2009
Electronic publication date: 25/3/2010
Collection year: 2010

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Creative Commons License
© 2010 Franceschi et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Instituto de Tecnologia e Pesquisa-ITP, Programa de Mestrado em Engenharia de Processos PEP/UNIT, Campus Farolândia, Av. Murilo Dantas, 300, Aracaju, SE, 49032-490, Brazil; Fax: +55-79-32182190; E-mail: elton@itp.org.br


Abstract

The objective of this work was to investigate the application of supercritical carbon dioxide as antisolvent for the co-precipitation of β-carotene and poly(hydroxybutirate-co-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV) with dichloromethane as organic solvent. For this purpose, the concentrations of β-carotene (1 to 8 mg.cm,-3) and PHBV (20 to 40 mg.cm-3) in the organic solution were varied keeping fixed temperature at 313 K, pressure at 8 MPa, solution flow rate at 1 cm3.min-1 and antisolvent flow rate at 39 g.min-1. The morphology of co-precipitated particles were spherical with very irregular and porous surface for some conditions and very smooth surfaces for others as verified by micrographs of scanning electronic microscopy (SEM). Results show that it is possible to achieve encapsulation efficiency values as high as 35 % just manipulating the concentration ratio of solute to polymer in organic solution. The methodology adopted for the quantification of β-carotene encapsulated was demonstrated to be adequate.

Keywords: Encapsulation, beta-carotene, carbon dioxide, bio-polymer, SEDS technique.