Yaidelin Manrique, Associate Laboratory LSRE-LCM | November 28, 2019 – 17h00 | FEUP Sala B020

The supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) has an enormous interest; in this region, the physical properties promote the separation, the density is similar to the liquid, and the viscosity is in the same order of magnitude of that of gases. The supercritical fluid is widely used to extract solutes from the interior of solid matrices, and also for counter-current extraction of a liquid stream.

Cork corresponds to the bark of the cork oak (Quercus Suber L.), a hundred percent natural plant tissue, that is composed, in average, by 14% extractives; these extractives are mainly constituted by triterpenic compounds that have promising applications as bioactive compounds or precursors to drug ingredients. Portugal is the world leader in the production, processing, and marketing of cork. The most important sector to the cork industry is the production of cork stoppers; in the process of natural cork stoppers production, ca. 60% of initial raw material is rejected; this rejected material is milled to be used in other applications, e.g. technical cork stoppers, agglomerated. This material was extracted using CO2 at supercritical conditions; the best performance for SFE was 19.7 g of extract / kg dry cork obtained at 210 bar and 41°C; for SFE with co-solvent, the yield increases almost 86%.

Yaidelin Manrique graduated in Chemical Engineering at the University Simón Bolívar in Venezuela in 2007. She obtained her Integrated Master in Chemical Engineering in 2010 with the thesis “Modeling and Simulation of Water-Gas Shift Reactors: from Conventional Packed-Bed to Membrane Reactor” at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (FEUP). In 2017, she received her Ph.D. degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the FEUP with the Ph.D. thesis entitled “Supercritical fluid extraction and fractionation of bioactive natural products from cork”. From that point forward, she has been working as a post-doctoral researcher at LSRE-LCM participating in several research projects in the field of Product Engineering.

[Host: Maria Eugénia Macedo, Associate Laboratory, LSRE-LCM]
Image credits: Yaidelin Manrique.