Supercritical Assisted Atomization: Polyvinylpyrrolidone as Carrier for Drugs with Poor Solubility in Water

Supercritical assisted atomization (SAA) is an efficient technique to produce microparticles and composite microspheres formed by polymers and pharmaceutical compounds. In this work polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) was proposed as carrier for pharmaceutical compounds that show a poor solubility in water medium. Indeed, this polymer is hydrosoluble and can be generally used to enhance the dissolution rate of hydrophobic compounds when finely dispersed in it. However, it is difficult to obtain coprecipitates with a uniform dispersion of the active molecule using other micronization techniques. The experiments were performed using ethanol as solvent; SAA plant was operated at 40°C and 76 bar in the …

Antioxidant phenolic compounds recovery from Mangifera indica L. by-products by supercritical antisolvent extraction

Abstract Supercritical Antisolvent Extraction (SAE) was used in the recovery of antioxidant compounds from mango by-products. The antioxidant extract was obtained by solid–liquid extraction using aqueous acetone (80% v/v) and subsequent adsorption/desorption in C18 cartridge. Recovery of antioxidants was performed by SAE using SC-CO 2 as antisolvent. The temperature and pressure parameters were varied in the range 35–45 °C and 8–15 MPa. The SAE process allowed the recovery of about 90% of the initial phenolic compounds, the best recovery was obtained at 40 °C and 10 MPa and the main compounds were mangiferin, isomangiferin, quercetin 3-O-galactoside, quercetin 3-O-glucoside, quercetin 3-O-x…

Supercritical fluid crystallization of adipic acid using urea as habit modifier

The crystal morphology of adipic acid mediated by the action of urea as additive has been investigated using the supercritical antisolvent precipitation (SAS). The process was performed using acetone and carbon dioxide as solvent and antisolvent, respectively. The effect of urea concentration in the liquid solution and of precipitation pressure on the crystal habit was investigated; the products were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and infrared spectrometry (FT-IR). Urea was found to be very effective in modifying the crystal habit of adipic acid from needle-like shape with a length of several hun…

Role of Phase Behavior and Atomization in the Supercritical Antisolvent Precipitation

An experimental study on supercritical antisolvent (SAS) precipitation has been performed to gain insight into the role of phase behavior and atomization in controlling morphology and dimension of precipitates. The mixture yttrium acetate/dimethyl sulfoxide has been used as the main model system and supercritical CO 2 has been used as the antisolvent. Two SAS apparatuses (laboratory and pilot scale) with two injector arrangements and operating with various injector diameters in the range 60-500 μm have been used. The results showed that operating above the mixture critical point (MCP) of the ternary mixture yttrium acetate/dimethyl sulfoxide/ carbon dioxide, sub-micrometric particles are ge…

Expanded micro-particles by supercritical antisolvent precipitation: Interpretation of results

Abstract Supercritical antisolvent (SAS) micronization has been used to obtain nanoparticles and micro-particles of several kinds of materials. Sometimes hollow expanded micro-particles have also been obtained. This work is focused on the analysis of this last morphology. We organized literature data and our previous experiments and we added new experiments on previously tested compounds and on compounds never tested before. As a result, expanded micro-particles using several compounds belonging to different categories and precipitated from different solvents in laboratory and pilot scale plants were obtained with diameters between about 10 and 180 μm. They also showed different sub-structu…

Supercritical Antisolvent Extraction of Bioactive Compounds from Mango by-Products

Use of supercritical CO2 and N2 as dissolved gases for the atomization of ethanol and water

Supercritical dissolved gas atomization (SDGA) is an atomization process in which a gas at temperatures and pressures above the critical point is used as the atomizing medium. The concept of SDGA has been applied mainly using CO 2 as atomizing gas in various processes developed for the production of fine particles of pharmaceuticals, polymers, and chemical products and for the atomization of fuels. In this work, SDGA, using ethanol and water as the liquids to be atomized, has been experimentally studied. The spray characteristics, in terms of droplet size and distribution, have been investigated using a laser diffraction analyzer. Ethanol has been chosen due to the large miscibility with CO…

Analysis of Dissolved-Gas Atomization: Supercritical CO2 Dissolved in Water

Supercritical dissolved-gas atomization is an atomization process in which carbon dioxide at temperature and pressure above its critical point is used as the atomizing gas. The spray characteristics in terms of droplets size and distribution have been experimentally studied using a laser diffraction method based on a Malvern apparatus. The main parameter that influences the droplets size is the gas-to-liquid mass ratio (GLR); the injection pressure in the range of 7.4-13 MPa has a minor effect. Upon variation of the GLR from 0.5 to 3, the droplet mean diameter changes from about 8.0 to 2.0 μm; very narrow droplet size distributions are also produced. From the point of view of the atomizatio…

Spherical microparticles production by supercritical antisolvent precipitation: Interpretation of results

Abstract Supercritical antisolvent micronization has been the subject of many works aimed at the production of precipitates with controlled particle size and morphology. Several morphologies have been observed; but, the production of spherical micrometric particles has been the major objective of most of the studies performed. Therefore, in this work, literature data analysis on spherical and related morphologies has been performed. The ranges of process conditions at which spherical microparticles have been obtained have been listed and discussed. A possible formation mechanism is proposed that is based on the competition between jet break-up and liquid surface tension vanishing characteri…

Silica aerogel–metal composites produced by supercritical adsorption

Abstract Silica aerogel has been loaded with ruthenium acetyl acetonate (Ru(acac) 3 ) by adsorption from supercritical carbon dioxide. Adsorption isotherms and kinetics were measured at different pressures and temperatures. The properties of impregnated aerogel were obtained by optical and electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray microanalysis (EDX) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Results showed that Ru(acac) 3 can be uniformly dispersed into the aerogel up to 5 wt%. Moreover, precursor loading is controllable by properly changing operating conditions. The adsorbed metallorganic compound has been reduced to elemental ruthenium by heat treatment without inducing degradation and morphological c…