In the past three decades, great efforts have been made to develop new methods for the extraction of natural molecules. Improved extraction technologies have garnered scientific interest as they have helped in understanding how mass and energy transfer exhibited for a solvent and solute during a chemical extraction can be used as physical chemistry parameters, leading to the modeling and design of new advantageous equipment. In situ data collected during a chemically assisted experiment is useful in a variety of scientific and technological applications, especially in generating extractors that are safer, more efficient, and offer true opportunities to scale them up in a wide range of materials (among stainless steel).

This book compiles empirical and traditional extraction methods applied to cutting-edge critical extraction research in the areas of food science, phytochemistry, pharmacy, fragrance, cosmetology, and folk medicine. It presents extraction technology as an interdisciplinary area that applies the principles of physics and chemistry as tools to develop engineered models for the construction of more advanced extraction devices. It includes examples and problems related to data treatment in normal laboratory research work that will facilitate undergraduate- and graduate-level students, as well as operators working in the area, in solving real problems.

Tulio Chavez-Gil is an associate professor at the Department of Natural Sciences, Coppin State University, USA. He has been teaching advanced inorganic, bio-inorganic, health, and physical chemistry at different institutions—University of São Paulo, Brazil (1996), University of the Andes, Colombia (2003), Inter-American University of Puerto Rico (2004–2014), and Coppin State University (2014–present). He earned his BS in chemistry from Universidad del Valle, Colombia (1991) and his PhD from the University of São Paulo (1997). He won a JSPS Postdoctoral Award and spent two years at the School of Pharmacy, Kumamoto University, Japan (1997). Dr Chavez-Gil was also awarded the NIH Associate Researcher Award by the University of Puerto Rico (2000). He has authored over 40 peer-reviewed papers and has delivered talks at NEXUS2017, ACS2018, and TechConnect 2019 on semi-critical extraction as part of a patented invention.