Supercritical Fluid Processing in Food and Pharmaceutical Industries: Scale- Up Issues

From the early 70s, supercritical fluid processing found numerous applications at industrial scale in the food industry through extraction and fractionation processes. In the same time, over the past two decades, a wide variety of supercritical fluid (SCF)-based processes dedicated to the design and engineering of particles were investigated mainly for applications in the pharmaceutical industry. Among these particle engineering processes, none of them reached commercial and full scale production yet in the pharmaceutical industry, but a few ones finally found valuable large scale applications in the food industry. Keys for the scale-up of well-known extraction and fractionation processes, together with examples of applications are discussed briefly. After a short reminder of the various SCF-based particle engineering processes described in the literature, the scale-up issues of these particle engineering processes for industrial applications are detailed. The discussed features then focus on pharmaceutical industry peculiar requirements, such as compliance with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP). Finally, examples of recent applications, together with cost estimations, are given.