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).