The use of supercritical fluids in the extraction of natural products reveals to be a potential future technology with a number of advantages when compared to common liquid solvents. Many extraction processes involving natural products include applications that range from those already developed on a commercial scale such as coffee decaffienation to those being studied on a laboratory scale such as the extraction of alkaloids and the encapsulation of chemotherapeutic agents with the recrystallization from near critical mixtures and /or by the utilization of supercritical fluids as anti-solvents. With the objective of obtaining fundamental information from experiment and theory that can contribute to the scientific development of this promising new and potential technology which explores the distinct properties of supercritical fluids in Brazil, the Laboratory of Process Engineering of the Department of Thermo Fluid Dynamics at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), have dedicated a good part of its research activities to the study of the extraction of active principles from plant material using supercritical fluids. In this work, we present a brief exposition of the activities being carried out and some of the results obtained to date.
natural products; supercritical fluids; extraction; fractionation; adsorption; alumina
