Caffeine, aby-product of coffee decaffeination by-product, acts as a stimulant and diuretic in the human organism. Most of the caffeine is used in the cola soft drink and pharmaceutical industries. Supercritical CO2 has long been used to decaffeinate coffee beans. However, little is known about the extraction of other alkaloids such as trigonelline. This alkaloid and the products generated by its thermal degradation (nicotinic acid - the vitamin niacin) have received a lot of attention because of their nutritional importance. Trigonelline acts mainly on the nervous central system, the secretion bile and the intestine. The main objective of this work was to obtain experimental data on the extraction of the alkaloids caffeine and trigonelline from canephora (Robusta) coffee beans using supercritical CO2. The decaffeination of this coffee can be economically attractive to obtain caffeine and to upgrade the value of this variety of coffee. New data on the continuouos fractionation of Brazilian Robusta coffee beans using supercritical CO2 at 313, 323 and 343 K and pressures ranging from 9,5 to 23,5 MPa for the extraction and separation of caffeine and trigonelline are presented. Caffeine and trigonelline in the extracted mixture were analyzed using HPLC. A thermodynamic model that uses a quartic equation of state was successfully employed to correlate the solubility behavior of pure caffeine in supercritical CO2.
Supercritical extraction; Alkaloids; Coffee; Caffeine; Trigonelline; Thermodynamics model
