Purification Process of Stevioside Using Zeolites and Membranes

Abstract

Stevia rebaudiana is a plant native of South America, and its active constituents are considered, by Food Science researchers, the "sweeteners of the future." Therefore, research on this plant has been increased. Stevia is a source of natural diet sweetening, without calories and safe for health. Its crude extract, however, is foul-smelling, bitter tasting, and dark brown; subsequent purification is essential to obtain a product of commercial quality. In this work, adsorption in modified zeolites associated with the filtration with membranes was applied in order to purify stevia crude extract. For the adsorption process, 40 g of CaX modified zeolites were used. In the ultrafiltration process, membranes with porosities of 0.05, 0.1 and 0.2 ?m were used. The transmembrane pressure was fixed at 2, 4 and 6 bar for each membrane. The best conditions of flux were obtained with the 0.2 ?m membrane and 6 bar, resulting in high clarification and recuperation of stevioside (91.75%). This work shows that the adsorption in modified zeolites associated with the membrane filtration is promising for stevia extract purification.

Chemistry and analytical techniques for ent-kaurene-glycosides of Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni - A review

“…1975;Okane and Kamata, 1977;Takamura et al, 1977;Ishizone, 1979;Kuroda and Kamiyama, 1979;Cheng et al, 1985;Fuh and Chiang, 1990;He et al, 1994;Rajab et al, 2009;Li et al, 2012;Deshmukhand Kedari, 2014;Kaur et al, 2014;Hubert et al, 2015;Anvari and Khayat, 2016). Selective adsorption using zeolites was also found suitable for stevia extract purification (Mantovaneli et al, 2004;Silva et al, 2007).…”

Simple extraction and membrane purification process in isolation of steviosides with improved organoleptic activity

“…Some of the recent stevioside isolation methodologies are expensive and are energy intensive process in obtaining pure steviol glycosides' [9][10][11]19]. Therefore, a simple, inexpensive and environmental friendly procedure in isolation of highly purified steviol glycosides is present day challenging problem [20][21][22][23]. Oxygen free radicals and other reactive oxygen species can cause oxidative injury to living organisms and thus play an important role in many lifestyle related diseases such arthritis, tissue injury, atherosclerosis, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases as well as ageing process [24][25][26].…”

Modeling of cross flow ultrafiltration of stevia extract in a rectangular cell

“…Various process steps were adopted for clarification and concentration. These were: ultrafiltration followed by reverse osmosis (Fuh and Chiang, 1990), microfiltration followed by ultrafiltration and nanofiltration (Zhang et al, 2000), pretreatment by modified zeolite followed by ultrafiltration (Silva et al, 2007). However, these works were mainly for technology demonstration and the effects of operating conditions on the system performance were not reported.…”