Study On The Process To Extract Synephrine From Fructus Aurantii Immaturus

Fructus Aurantii Immaturus (FAI) is a traditional herbal product. The constituents of FAI are complicated. It mainly contains volatile oil, alkaloids and hesperidins. Synephrine is one of the alkaloids in FAI, which have active function. Synephrine is a presser, which can cause an increase in blood pressure. And it also has a good function in dilatation trachea and bronchus. Besides, newly studies show that synephrine can accelerate metabolism, increase energy level and oxidant fattiness .It is a natural incident, which has no side effect. Now synephrine has been widely applied in medicine, food and beverage industry. FAI is cheap and available which provide a method for production of synephrine from FAI. Because there are several effective components in FAI, it is needed to develop a method to full use the ingredients. The goal of the research is to develop a technique to extract synephrine from FAI, which should have no negative effect on the extraction of other ingredients. The present research mainly consists of choosing extract method and process optimization, the study of the performance of adsorption and separation of ion-exchange resin for synephrine from the synephrine solution, the process optimization of synephrine purification by using ion-exchange resin column. To extract synephrine, the percolation processes was selected, the extraction steps include wetting powdery FAI, dipping the wet powder in hydrochloric acid solution and percolating by using hydrochloric acid solution. Through wetting the powder by water, the diffusion resistance is decreased. Then hydrochloric acid solution is added into the power. It is sufficient to avoid a great deal of impurity to dissolve in the solution when the powder is dipping in the hydrochloric acid solution directly. After comparing the results of the experiments, the research choose to wet FAI powder for12 hours by water, then add 0.2mol/l hydrochloric acid solution into the powder to dip the powder for 2hours, the solvent ratio (hydrochloric acid solution (v): power (w)) is 3:1. Orthogonal experiments are designed to optimize the percolation processes. The optimized level of those factors are: the solvent concentration-0.02mol/l, the powder: solvent (w: v)-1:9,the flow rate: 5ml/min. through the optimized technique, the concentration of synephrine in the extraction is 0.77mg/ml, the extraction efficiency of synephrine reach 95.4%. The ion equilibrium in ion-exchange process is studied in the research. Cation-exchange resin 001×8 was found to have high adsorption ability and satisfied desorbing performance. Therefore, the study chooses this resin to purify the extraction. The adsorption and eluting conditions for ion-exchange chromatography are obtained: synephrine extraction concentration -0.77mg/ml, flow rate-6ml/min, pH of the extraction solution -2.4-2.8, eluting reagent concentration -5% ammonia, eluting flow rate -3ml/min. The purity of the product reached 22.27%, and synephrine extraction efficiency is 90.1%. In the whole extract process, the yield is 3.74%, synephrine extraction efficiency is 86%.