SFE-O: An Ontology for Knowledge-Grounded AI in Supercritical CO$_2$ Biomass Extraction and Fractionation

Thomas Pallet, Mario Lezoche, Gianpaolo Leone, Daniele Pizzichini, Diego Torres +2

Supercritical CO$_2$ extraction (CO$_2$-SFE) offers a sustainable route for recovering high-value compounds from biomass while limiting the use of conventional organic solvents, but its design and interpretation require heterogeneous knowledge spanning biomass properties, operating conditions, mass transfer, and product fractionation, typically fragmented across technical reports, engineering models, external databases, and expert practice. This paper introduces SFE-O, a modular Web Ontology Language (OWL 2) ontology for supercritical CO$_2$ biomass extraction, structured around interconnected Biomass, Process, and Product dimensions and extended with explicit representations of process topology, parameter provenance, external and internal mass-transfer phenomena, and the Constant Extraction Rate (CER) / Falling Extraction Rate (FER) mechanisms. Computational dependencies among process quantities are represented explicitly, without embedding numerical solving in the ontology, so that input, measured, computed, externally retrieved, and fitted parameters remain traceable. SFE-O reuses established semantic resources (ChEBI, QUDT, OWL-Time, PROV-O) and is evaluated through a worked…