ABSTRACT
Because of today’s pursuit for health products, the production and purifi cation of vegetable extracts is an area of interest to the industry and academia. In this book, extraction and purifi cation techniques are discussed. This book deals with unit operations for which mass transfer and phase equilibria dictate the performance of the processes. For instance, in Chapter 2 the use of steam distillation is discussed as applied to the deacidifi cation of vegetable oils and the production of volatile (essential) oils. In both cases, the knowledge of mass transfer as well as the thermodynamic behavior of the systems is required in order to optimize the process and, eventually, to bring the process to industry, an estimation of the cost of manufacturing the product by the selected technology is also needed. So, the three chapters of the book that deal with extraction techniques address the question of estimation of the cost of manufacturing.
