Steam explosion pretreatment to enhance extraction of active ingredients: current progress and future prospects

The active ingredients extracted from plant materials play an important role in human life and health, and the extraction is a critical step in the preparation of them. It is necessary to develop a sustainable and green extraction. Steam explosion pretreatment enhanced extraction is a higher efficiency, lower equipment investment, less hazardous chemicals and environment-friendly technique, which has been widely used to extract active ingredients from various plant materials. In this paper, current progress and future prospects of steam explosion pretreatment enhanced extraction are overviewed. The equipment, operating steps, strengthening mechanism, critical process factors are comprehensively introduced. Furthermore, recent applications and comparisons with other techniques are discussed in depth. Finally, the future development trends are prospected. The current results show that steam explosion pretreatment enhanced extraction has the advantage of high efficiency. Moreover, steam explosion is simple in equipment, and easy to operate. In conclusion, steam explosion pretreatment can be effectively used to enhance the extraction of active ingredients from plant materials.