Research Projects

Curcumin is the phytochemical that attributes the characteristic yellow color of turmeric, and has been proven to have significant pharmaceutical and nutraceutical value. A novel method to isolate curcumin using organic solvent-resistant membrane separations, following its extraction from turmeric is to be demonstrated. The membrane process will replace the evaporation of solvent to give saturated curcumin solution (known as oleoresin) in the extracting solvent. Since the heating involved in the traditional evaporation method is avoided in the membrane-based isolation, the curcumin quality (evaluated as bioactivity) is expected to be higher. Preliminary calculations show that the energy required by membranes instead of evaporation for the solvent recovery would be approximately 50 times lower. In this work, acetone is proposed to replace the traditionally-used extracting solvent, ethanol. Acetone is chosen because it has significantly higher permeability than ethanol for commercially-available solvent-resistant membranes. The proposed work first investigates the fundamental aspects of curcumin extraction using acetone. Accordingly, the thermodynamics, kinetics and extraction efficiency using acetone for varying operating conditions at the lab-scale will be investigated. Using the obtained information from these lab-scale experiments, a scaled-up extraction system can be modeled; a fixed bed extractor will be modeled by using geometric and dynamic similarity with the lab-scale experiments. According to the process scheme, the acetone solution containing extracted curcumin will be sent to the membrane system to bring curcumin to its saturation concentration in acetone. The commercially-available solvent resistant membranes, PM280 and NF080105 membrane made by Evonik and SolSep respectively will be investigated. These membranes have low molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) such that high curcumin rejection is expected, hence the permeated acetone is expected to have high purity and can be reused for extraction. The curcumin rejection efficiency by the membrane and fouling rate (by means of flux decline rate) will be studied for varying operating pressures and flowrates. A model inclusive of the fouling and intra-membrane transport will be developed, and this model will be extended to a system scale. The hybrid extraction-membrane system at a system-scale will be modeled, and its separation and thermodynamic efficiency will be compared to a traditional evaporation-based system. In addition, the bioactivity of the curcumin obtained from the membrane system will be evaluated, and the required cleaning frequency of the membrane system will be determined. Since the cost of isolated curcumin from raw turmeric is at least 30 times that of raw turmeric, and India is the world’s largest turmeric producer, it would be advantageous for Indian companies to extract curcumin in an affordable manner within India and export its products globally.