A supercritical tuneable process for the selective extraction of fats and essential oil from coriander seeds

A selective supercritical CO₂ extraction process has been developed in order to extract selectively the vegetal oil and the essential oil from coriander seeds in a consecutive way by tuning experimental conditions. A 4-step process has been set up: (i) seeds preparation by grinding and sieving, (ii) extraction by supercritical CO₂ and (iii; iv) selective separation in two separators with different pressure levels. The first part of this study consisted in studying the effects of the operating conditions (T, P, CO₂ density, flow rate and particle size distribution of ground seeds) on the yield of extraction. The results showed that the global performance of the process depends mainly on the pressure level of extraction, on the CO₂ flow rate and on the size of the ground seeds. An optimization of the parameters led to an extraction ratio of 90%. The second part of this study dealt with the effects of the operating conditions on the quality of extracts, and more precisely on their composition in vegetal oil and essential oil. It was observed that the supercritical extraction had no major effect on the fatty acid composition of the vegetal oil compared to classical extraction techniques, while essential oil is enriched in components such as linalool and that a previous drying of the seeds is deleterious. Finally, we propose a procedure in order to extract separately each oil by adjusting CO₂ density and separation conditions.