ISBN 978-3-8439-1361-4

978-3-8439-1361-4, Reihe Technische Chemie

Dominik Bergs
A contribution to chromatographic purification of natural products

171 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität Dortmund (2013), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Processing natural products is gaining importance in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industry. Especially the end consumer has a growing interest in natural products which have a sustainable organic origin. The investigation of new molecular targets from plant material increases the demand of fast and reliable screening methods to find suitable isolation and purification techniques. The objective of this thesis is to develop a process design method for the integration of phytoextraction and preparative chromatography in early stage of process development. The integrated process design method should be able to select a suitable solvent for a target component extraction from plant material with high extraction yield, high extraction selectivity and low costs. Therefore, a standard procedure for the systematic selection of solvents for natural product extraction is developed. Ten solvents are pre-selected using the molecular structure, knowledge based methods and the combination of three solubility estimation methods. These solvents are investigated under standardized extraction conditions where effects on extraction like kinetics, temperature, plant particle size and swelling behavior are equal or can be neglected. The most desirable solvent is determined by comparing relative values of yield, selectivity, and costs in a short time and with low material consumption. As a second objective the optimized extraction solvent should be used in the chromatographic separation as eluent which has not been taken into consideration so far. Suitable adsorbents for the chromatographic purification step should be selected to meet the demand on high purity target component. In this thesis, a guideline in the form of a decision tree uses the optimized extraction solvent as eluent in preparative chromatography to find suitable adsorbents using a combination of knowledge based methods and lab-scale elution experiments. Depending on which route in the decision tree is chosen, the best out of four possible proposals for a process design are selected as a final result of the design method and compared to other separation techniques. The structured approach helps to check whether the process alternative of extraction in combination with chromatography is an alternative to other separation techniques.