Pure genius

The new facility—the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere—has been designed by IRL scientists and engineers to meet the growing need for new high-value, high-purity natural products.

"The chromatograph is a concept born out of an industry pull—a client who required a facility to capture their high-value lipid product opportunity," says Industry Engagement senior account manager Tom Nicolle.

"Whilst IRL’s portable supercritical unit, SuperEx, enables companies to produce sample runs of products, a crucial part of the high-value manufacturing process, this new facility further refines the crude extract and separates it into individual and highly concentrated components."

The unit operates in a manner similar to the industry standard—preparative HPLC^[?]—except that instead of an organic solvent it uses a supercritical fluid. The technology is more environmentally benign as the supercritical fluid is recyclable, whereas in preparative HPLC the organic solvent normally goes to waste.

Like SuperEx, a pilot plant developed by IRL that uses carbon dioxide and other gases at high pressure to extract valuable compounds from natural materials, the pilot-scale chromatography unit is available for companies to hire and use within an environment that is already registered as compliant with the relevant food processing, pharmaceutical and cosmetics regulations.