Supercritical carbon dioxide extraction of lipids from Eucalyptus globulus wood

Ponencia presentada en el 8th Symposium of Handling of Environmental and Biological Samples in Chromatography and and the 26th Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Group of Chromatograph. Celebrado del 26 al 29 de octubre, 1997, en Almería.

Due to its well-known advantages Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE) have greatly expanded its application field as alternative to conventional extraction methods in the last decade. Most of these applications do not include the screening of all extractable components present in the solid matrix but individual extraction of specific classes of organics, such as pollutant families present in environmental samples. In the present work, we applied SFE to the extraction as a whole of lipids from Eucalyptus globulus wood. This is a new specific analytical problem, and, as usual in SFE applications, it was necessary to find empirically which parameters influence the extraction efficiency, since many different factors may affect the recovery of analytes. As an empirical approach to obtain reliable results in a reasonable time is an arduous and tedious task, we use a statistical approach. For practical reasons the operational parameters considered were temperature, pressure and the use of different concentrations of a modifier, methanol, to improve the extraction efficiency of supercritical carbon dioxide. Their influence on the extraction efficiency have been evaluated by using an optimized rotatable central composite design, which change the above three variables to result a 23 factorial design. The extracts obtained under different conditions were analyzed by OC using an improved methodology (Gutiérrez el al., this meeting). The main conclusion drawn is that lipids of the E globulus wood, including fatty acids, sterols and steryl esters among others, can be extracted by CO, in supercritical conditions, being the extracts qualitatively similar to those obtained by Soxhlet extraction.

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