Resin selection for the separation of caffeine from green tea catechins

• A methodology has been developed for fast selection of resins with a minimum set of experiments.
• Batch uptake experiments of green tea with macroporous polymeric adsorbents were performed.
• A design of the experiments was performed in order to maximize the accuracy of the parameters.
• Multicomponent Langmuir parameters were regressed from the experimental data.
• A resin was chosen based on criteria calculated from isotherm parameters.

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).