Solubility of nutraceuticals in pure and mixed solvents

• Author(s): Ferreira, Olga ; Pinho, Simão
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/2617
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Nutraceuticals; Solubility; Reference solvent approach; Excess solubility approach; NRTL-SAC; Experimental
• Document Type: Conference Object
• Language: English

Description

Nutraceuticals are compounds that provide a health benefit above and beyond basic nutrition. The integration of these products in the food industry involves the study of extraction, precipitation or crystallization processes in order to concentrate, separate and purify a specific compound or formulation. Therefore, a fast and efficient selection of food-approved solvents is required for a growing number of bioactive substances that are continuously being identified and tested. However, these compounds contain in their structure a variety of functional groups that makes them difficult to represent by usual thermodynamic models and procedures. One goal of this work is to present new solubility data of hesperitin, quercetin and rutin in pure solvents like acetone, ethanol, ethyl acetate, n-hexane and water, in the temperature range between 25 and 60 ºC by using the shake-flask method followed by quantitative analysis. Additionally, another goal involves the combination of the measured data and that already compiled from the open literature, to develop a methodology to represent the solid-liquid equilibrium of nutraceuticals compounds using the the NRTL-SAC model, which has been successfully applied in the solubility description of high complex molecules like drugs. The shake-flask method proved to be an adequate method to measure the solubility of nutraceuticals in pure and mixed solvents, in the temperature range between 25 and 60 ºC. The NRTL-SAC model showed to be an appropriate tool to represent the solubility of these molecules, and suggests its ability to predict solubility in solvents not considered during the correlation procedure.