Modeling strategies for essential oil extraction by hydrodistillation and steam distillation

Essential oils are volatile chemical compounds, characteristic for their fragrance and common antimicrobial and antioxidant activities. These oils are extracted from trichomes of the aromatic plants by distillation process, either using only steam (steam distillation), water and steam or only water (hydrodistillation); or also by mechanical processing of citrus fruit pericarp, extraction with organic solvents or supercritical fluid, for example. In both cases the mathematical modeling is relevant: in the steam distillation in order to design industrial plants with determination optmized operating conditions; in the hydrodistillation, normally used in laboratory scale, in order to obtain a better description of the extraction behavior and a greater accuracy in experimental data determination. In this research four extraction process models from literature are presented, analyzed and discussed.

essential oils; intraparticle diffusion; phase equilibria; particle geometry