Optimization of Yield for Extraction of an Essential Oil from Cinnamon Using Microwave-Assisted Extraction

Abstract

Essential oil is concentrated hydrophobic liquid which containing volatile aromatic compounds extracted from flowers, leaves, stems, roots, seeds, barks, resins, or fruit rinds. These oils are often used for their flavor and their therapeutic or odoriferous properties, in a wide selection of products such as foods, medicines, and cosmetics. Extraction of essential oils is one of the most time and effort consuming processes. Cinnamon is an important herbal medicine with good effects of health promotion and disease prevention. In this work, the volatile compounds of cinnamon bark were extracted by Hydrodistillation and Microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) techniques. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry was used to identify and quantify the volatile compound composition. The results indicated that cinnamaldehyde was the major component with the highest % area of 89.324% in the volatile oils extracted by MAE while in hydrodistillation method cinnamaldehyde was about 68%. MAE has been recognized as a technique with several advantages over other extraction methods, such as reduction of costs, extraction time, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions. MAE technique is a green technique which is highlighted by increased extraction yield, decreased time and solvent consumption, moreover the reproducibility is better. For this purpose, various process parameters such as solid loading, water volume, microwave power and extraction time were studied in detail and optimized using the Taguchi method and Artificial neural network. The optimized extraction conditions were obtained at, solid loading of 30 g, water volume of 250 ml, microwave power of 700 W and extraction time of 25 min. Under optimized conditions, 4.169% (w/w) yield of essential oil was obtained.