4. Description
In various natural products based industries, pharmaceuticals, edible oils and herbal extracts vacuum distillation is a regular process to separate out the solvents. But the vacuum pumps are highly power consuming and expensive and also form a zoetrope which will make the distillation process many times cumbersome and unviable, the present method of invention is an effort towards optimizing the vacuum distillation process, using low cost vacuum generation methods. The concept of adding some Nano material additives which will create a suitable environment for the plant or materials to increase their solubility in the selected solvents is a key innovation.
Background of invention
The general methods of extraction and isolation of the alkaloids from the plant sources one has to take into consideration the following steps in a sequential manner, namely:
(i) Separation of the alkaloid(s) from the main bulk of the non-alkaloidal substances,
(ii) Most of the alkaloid-containing plants, several alkaloids having closely related chemical structures are normally present, such as: the cinchona alkaloids consist of more than twenty five alkaloids. There is hardly any known plant source that contains only one alkaloid exclusively,
(iii) Separation of each individual alkaloid from the mixture of alkaloids obtained from a particular plant source (e.g., cinchona bark) using latest separation techniques, for instance, preparative high-performances liquid chromatography, (HPLC) column chromatography, by the help of chromatotron, and high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC).
Nevertheless, the general methods of isolation of alkaloids largely depend upon several vital factors, for instance: (a) the alkaline nature of most alkaloids, (b) the ability and ease of formation of alkaloidal salts with acids, and (c) the relative solubilities of the resulting alkaloidal salts either in polar organic solvents e.g., ethanol, chloroform, isopropanol etc., or in aqueous medium.
The general methods of extraction of alkaloids from the plant sources solely depend upon the purpose and scale of the operation (e.g., pilot scale or commercial scale). It is also based on the quantum and bulk of the raw material to be employed in the operation. Of course, for research purposes column chromatography using ion-exchange resins have been used successfully and effectively to strip the plant materials of their alkaloidal contents. However, in the commercial scale large volumes of aqueous extracts of plant materials are normally pumped through huge metallic columns packed with cationic resins