New proposal for production of bioactive compounds by supercritical technology integrated to a sugarcane biorefinery

The construction of a supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) plant inside or in close proximity to a sugarcane biorefinery producing first and second generation ethanol demonstrated to be very promising, increasing the economic potential of the SFE process in up to 57 %, since the SFE plant could use directly the ethanol, CO₂, heat, and electricity already available, with lower prices. In this study, Brazilian ginseng roots were used as model bioactive compounds source and first the statistical influence of the extraction conditions including pressure (10–20 MPa), temperature (323–363 K), and CO₂/ethanol proportion ratio (90:10, 50:50, and 0:100 %, w/w) on the β-ecdysone content in the extracts was experimentally evaluated and compared with literature results. SFE process evaluated experimentally at the present study showed higher selective extraction for β-ecdysone from Brazilian ginseng roots, providing an extract with up to 2.16 times higher β-ecdysone than the results obtained in previous studies. Thermal integration of the SFE process diminished energy requirements of the process, resulting in a reduction of cold utility requirement of 87 % and a final electricity demand of 7.5 kWh/g of β-ecdysone in the extract. In a situation in which the Brazilian ginseng roots price was increased to 4.71 USD/g, only the SFE integrated with the biorefinery solution would be economically feasible. Finally, the selling of the ginseng roots leftover could be an interesting answer to increase the economical attractiveness of the integrated SFE process to the biorefinery.