The objective of this work is to study the fractionation of the citrus oils, especially orange oil. The orange oil is considered to be a mixture of two main components, limonene and linalool, which represent the terpenes and oxygenated group fractions, respectively. The Peng-Robinson equation of state using the van der Waals, with one or two parameters, and Panagiotopoulos and Reid mixing rules, were used to correlate and predict the binary and ternary high pressure phase equilibria of CO2 containing systems . The use of thermodynamic models to predict the phase equilibria allowed to establish the conditions of temperature and pressure, which led to the best results of selectivities and capacities of the extraction.
Supercritical extraction; orange oil; fractionation
