PROCESS SYNTHESIS AND DESIGN FOR EXTRACTION OF BIOACTIVE COMPOUNDS FROM STROBILANTHES CRISPUS LEAVES (SC)

Herbs are well known for medicinal purposes throughout human history. Benefits and applications of herbs have been well known and used in traditional medicine since centuries ago, including healing of different diseases, maintaining and restoring body balances. Bioactive compounds in the herbs is recognised as compounds that help in defencing human body by deterring formation of free radical chain reactions that attack human body's cells. However, postharvest processing of herbs via drying and extraction methods affected the quality and quantity of the bioactive compounds. Therefore, in this work, a systematic process synthesis and design approach for extraction of bioactive compounds from herbs is presented. Commercial process simulation software, PRO/II 9.1 was used to simulate and analyse the performance of bioactive compounds extraction from the herbs. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a case study on Strobilanthes Crispus leaves (SC) production is presented. Selection of technologies and design parameters can be used to maximise the productivity and minimise the operation cost for bioactive compounds production. Based on the optimised result, the optimum process configuration consists of convective air drying-supercritical fluid extraction and ultrafiltration. In this process, it is estimated to retain 23.89% of phenolic acids. The annual operating cost of this process is located as US 29,304, which is 1.26 times lower than combined microwave vacuum drying-supercritical fluid extraction-ultrafiltration. Meanwhile, the final product flow rate is 56,494 kg/year, which is 5.23 times higher