Extração de fenóis do bálsamo de cajú

Abstract

As part of the ongoing research work, at the Department of Chemistry at the University Eduardo Mondlane, on the synthesis of active substances from cashew balm, this work was started, with the main objective of separating the phenols from the polymerized material existing in the balsam. of industrial cashew, through the reaction of esterification in a basic medium. It has been found that the sodium hydroxide solution dissolves very little of the sample of industrial cashew balm under study and that therefore the yield of the phenolic esters formed after treatment with benzoyl chloride is very low. Attempts to circumvent this situation using pyridine (an organic base) have not improved the situation. Infrared spectra of esterification products show absorption bands at 1740 crn-1(carbonyl-C=O), 1015 and 1140 cm-1(C-O), which confirms the presence of the esters. These results allow us to conclude that: Treatment of the basic industrial cashew balm solution with benzoyl chloride leads to the formation of phenolic esters. The sample of the industrial cashew balm under study contains high percentages of polymerized material, hence the difficult dissolution of the phenols in the bases and which, as a consequence, lowers the efficiency of the esterification reaction. Considering that the industrial cashew balm used in this study is quite old (more than 3 years old), it is recommended, for a better evaluation of the method, to carry out more experiments using the recently extracted industrial cashew balm. (TRADUÇÃO NOSSA)