COFFEE WITH CHEMOMETRIC: AN APPLICATION OF 25-1 FRACTIONAL FACTORIAL DESIGN

Chemometrics is a subfield of chemistry that emerged from advances in analytical instrumentation and computing. When seeking to solve chemical problems that depend on many concomitants experimental variables, chemometrics can be employed in order to extract as much information as possible in the least possible number of experiments. In addition, it is possible to evaluate the important effects and interactions among the variables to understand the processes being monitored in each system. In this sense, this article aimed to develop a didactic experiment of caffeine extraction using an espresso machine, applying the 25-1 fractional factorial design. The variables studied were temperature (75 and 78 °C), pressure (2 and 15 bar), granulation (bean and ground), type of coffee (special and traditional) and period of the day (morning and afternoon) to obtain maximum extraction of caffeine. The coffee extracts obtained were analyzed using UV-Vis molecular absorption spectrophotometry. The developed experiment showed the potential to spread the application of chemometrics in the academic environment and to facilitate the teaching of fractional factorial design.