Essential oil is a concentrated, hydrophobic liquid containing volatile aroma compounds from plants, They are used in perfumes, cosmetics, soap and other products, for flavoring food ,drink, and for scenting incense also household cleaning products.
The main objectives of this project are to extract essential oils from different Palestinian plants by several methods and to construct pilot steam distillation equipment
There are many methods of essential oil extraction, the most popular being steam distillation. Other methods such as solvent extraction and cold pressing were used to extract essential oil in this project.
Many experiments were done using steam distillation equipment. Many modifications are carried out on condenser to achieve successful collection of volatile oils from orange peels, lavender leaves and cloves seeds. Essential oils such as sage oil and chamomile are collected at temperatures higher than 120ºC, where the percentage of oil in sage approximately 1%.
Ethanol was used as a solvent in solvent extraction experiments. The extracted medical plant seeds are: Lavender, Cloves, Nettle, Watercress, Chamomile, Citrus seeds, where the percentage of oil in lavender approximately 0.3%.
Cold pressing experiments were done in Jenin. The extracted medical plant seeds are: Nettle, Watercress, where the percentage of oil in watercress approximately 0.2%.