Ponkan essential oil from peels and agro-industrial waste of Citrus reticulata Blanco

Abstract

Article Information The tangerine juice corresponds to 47 wt.% of the fruits and it is normally extracted by pressing generating agro-industrial waste rich in compounds with market value. Thus, the objective of this study was to obtain the essential oil from Citrus reticulata Blanco peels and compare it with those obtained from the waste of the ponkan tangerine juice industry, rich in d -limonene. The waste and peels were cut into pieces of approximately 1 cm², dried in an oven with air circulation at 50 °C for 15 h, ground, and classified by sieving with particle size between 20 to 28 mesh . The moisture content in dried waste and peels were 8.5 wt.% and 6.0 wt.%, respectively. A particle size was defined for the extractions. The essential oil extractions were performed by hydrodistillation, in Clevenger method, with 50 g of sample, 500 mL of distilled water for 2 h. The essential oil yield was 0.22 wt.% (88.5 % of d -limonene) for ponkan waste and 1.65 wt.% of for ponkan peel (89.7 % of d - limonene). The results showed that separation of the Ponkan peel before processing the fruit enables more efficient extraction of the compounds of interest.