Orange Oil

Title of proposed project

To determine the optimum conditions that extract the greatest volume of orange oil.

(a) Research background (introduction and problem statement) According to The Free Dictionary (2003), extraction can be defined as a separation procedure in which a substance is separated from its matrix using various methods. Extraction can be categorized into liquid-liquid extraction and solid phase extraction. When it comes to oil extraction, it can be elucidated as a process of isolating oil from fleshy fruits such as olive and avocado, seeds like sesame seed and peanuts, fruit peels such as lemon peels and orange peels as well as animal by-products (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2016). Due to the

Steam distillation is an efficacious way to extract orange oil as orange oil is immiscible with water. Moreover, the boiling point of orange oil is around 180°C. So, steam distillation is cost saving as the temperature of the system can be remained at boiling point of water, which requires less fuel for the steam boiler. Furthermore, by maintaining the temperature at the boiling point of water, the degradation of the extracted orange oil can be greatly reduced (Martin, n.d.). Steam distillation of orange oil is a method in which a mixture of orange peels and distilled water is boiled in a distillation apparatus, causing the globules of oil in the peels to burst out from the cell walls due to increasing heat and kinetic energy. The oil is then carried by the steam into a Liebig condenser. The flow of cold water into the Liebig condenser causes the steam containing the orange oil to condense into liquid form. After that, the liquid is poured into a separatory funnel to separate the oil from the water which is known as “hydrosol” (Misty Rae Cech,

According to their results, 1.2%-2.1% of transparent essential oil was extracted by distillation process whereas compression process extracted 1.0%-1.6% of flaxen essential oil but the odour of the compressed essential oil was closer to the fragrance of real citrus fruit compared to distilled essential oil. Therefore, they concluded that compression process is the most suitable method to extract large-scale continuous citrus essential oil. However, our group decided to use steam distillation method to extract the orange oil because our experiment does not require large-scale continuous production. Furthermore, based on their research, steam distillation yielded more orange oil compared to compressing method, meaning that if we use compressing method, we have to prepare more orange peels for our experiment. This is costly and unproductive compared to steam distillation