Measurement and correlation of solubility of artemisinin in supercritical carbon dioxide

Artemisinin is an effective antimalarial drug isolated from the herbal medicine Artemisia annua L. Supercritical fluid extraction is an environment-friendly method for the extraction of artemisinin. In this work, the solubility of artemisinin in supercritical carbon dioxide was determined by static method at three temperatures of 313 K, 323 K, 333 K and pressures from 11 to 31 MPa. The range of experimental solubility data was from 0.498 × 10⁻³ to 2.915 × 10⁻³ mol/mol under the above-mentioned conditions. Two density-based models (Chrastil and Mendez–Santiago–Teja models) were selected to correlate the experimental data of this work, and the average absolute relative deviation (AARD) was 8.32% and 8.33%, respectively. The correlation results showed good agreement with the experimental data.