Hydrodistillation of Essential Oil from Cymbopogon flexuosus

Hydrodistillation is a potentially useful method to extract essential oil from various plant materials and was used to separate essential oil from Cymbopogon flexuosus (lemongrass). The yield is dependent on various parameters like weight of raw material, volume of water, size of raw material and nature of raw material. The purpose of this study was to find the optimum values of these parameters. The optimized conditions for the extraction were 50 g of raw material, 500 ml of water volume, plant size of 25 mm, and the yield obtained was 1.04 percent. The loss of about nine percent essential oil was observed during drying of leaves of lemongrass. Composition of the essential oil was analyzed by GC-MS and higher amount of oxygenated compounds, mainly citral, was found in each sample. There was not much variation observed in amount of citral. The results indicated that hydrodistillation may further be utilized for scale up studies.