Recently I decided to grab some mint from my garden and extract the oil from the leaves through distillation. Here was my procedure:
1) Place lightly shredded mint leaves into a 500ml, 2 neck RBF.
2) Add enough water to nearly cover the mint leaves.
3) Add a thermometer to the center neck of the flask, attach the rest of the distillation apparatus to the other neck. [Just a bent adapter, a 400mm
Liebig condenser, vacuum adapter, another RBF]
4) Heat the mixture with a Bunsen burner until approximately 50ml of distillate were collected.
I then proceeded to place this distillate into a test tube to salt the oil out of the water. I used magnesium sulfate to salt it out. At the time, I
had no sodium chloride on hand, which is much more soluble in water than magnesium sulfate.
I developed several questions during this experiment:
How much of a difference does the solubility of the salt make?
Are there any other processes that are used to efficiently extract oil from mint leaves?
Any help is greatly appreciated.bfesser - 22-6-2013 at 21:00
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_(chemistry)" target="_blank">Solvent extraction</a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png"
/> (nowadays <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide" target="_blank">supercritical
CO<sub>2</sub></a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png" /> and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeller_pressing" target="_blank">pressing</a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png" /> come to
mind.
[Edited on 7/9/13 by bfesser]Fantasma4500 - 23-6-2013 at 07:31
i used water and i havent gotten any results, never thought of how polarity and all of these words actually plays together with it, very interesting
idea to extract your own oil
actually wondered about this thing many times
so i suppose you could try with different solvents, and then add the solvent with hopefully oil dissolved in it to water where it would loose non
polarity and thereby the oil wouldnt be soluble in it anymore..
same procedure is done with recrystallalization of ETN
ETN is dissolved in ethanol
ethanol is added to water, where concentration of ethanol goes very low and the ETN precipitates out
just that oil is usually lighter than water so you should be able to extract it with a syringe or pipettebfesser - 23-6-2013 at 07:38
[Edited on 7/9/13 by bfesser]subsecret - 23-6-2013 at 09:33
Sorry, I don't plan on messing with homemade explosives. It's just too dangerous. That recrystallization process is good, but after doing some further
research, I might just use DCM for the extraction. Thanks for the help.
[Edited on 7/8/13 by bfesser]Magpie - 23-6-2013 at 09:50
My understanding is that commercially mint is recovered by steam distillation using the harvest truck itself as the RBF. I don't think any "salting
out" is used. Here's a video of a good ol' boy harvesting mint oil.
[Edited on 23-6-2013 by Magpie]bfesser - 23-6-2013 at 10:38
<strong>Awesomeness</strong>, I was just defining <strong>Antiswat</strong>'s ambiguous acronym. I have no idea why he was
talking about ETN.12AX7 - 23-6-2013 at 17:13
and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeller_pressing" target="_blank">pressing</a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png" /> come to
mind.