Resin selection for the separation of caffeine from green tea catechins

This work focuses on the rapid selection of a resin from a defined set of macroporous polymeric resins for the decaffeination of catechins from green tea. High-throughput experimentation and design of experiments are used in order to retrieve as much information as possible from a small set of experiments on the interaction of components with the resins. A multicomponent Langmuir isotherm model is used to describe the adsorption and parameters are regressed with high accuracy. These parameters are subsequently used for the definition of criteria to calculate a weighted resin score. The optimal resin is Diaion 20HP with a score of 90.50%, mainly due to its good selectivity for caffeine over catechin (3). (C) 2014 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.