Extraction of lupeol from lupin hulls has been carried out using supercritical CO2 extraction technology under different operating conditions in order to obtain value-added extracts from the raw material of industrial lupin. The operational parameters used include CO2 pressure and flow and sequential depressurization fractionation. The highest lupeol recovery (96.8%) has been obtained using 320 bar and 50 g/min of CO2. For sequential depressurization, the best results were obtained with a CO2 density close to 728 kg/m3 providing up to 92% of lupeol in the extract and an enrichment factor of 1.2. Despite this high enrichment, lupeol recovery decreases to 50% after fractionation. Better extraction recoveries would have been expected and thus further studies are necessary to improve the extraction recovery of extracts with a high lupeol composition.

This study has been funded by Comunidad de Madrid (ALIBIRD, S2018/BAA-436 4343), Fundación Ramón Areces and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Project number PID2020–119084RB-C21). Celia Bañares thanks Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and the European Social Fund for a pre-doctoral FPI grant (BES- 2017–080853). Assamae Chabni thanks Comunidad de Madrid for a pre-doctoral grant (PEJD-2019-PRE/BIO-14522).

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

This article is published under an open access license.

Peer reviewed