Overcoming challenges in cold press aided extraction of orange peel oil

Abstract

The use of cold press (CP) for recovery of orange essential oil from orange peels has limitation due to poor oil yield and merging CP with conventional solvent or high temperature distillation affects the oil quality and hence it is important to enhance the CP oil yield retaining the quality of oil. In the present work the parameters for CP including the effect of albedo, orange peel average particle size, physical and chemical properties of the aqueous phase obtained after CP are examined which explains the reason for the poor oil yield by CP. Also, a green aqueous extraction (AE) process that eliminates the use of solvent or enzymes or high temperature and time has been designed. The developed CP produced ~0.12 g of oil at 0.75 h, CPAE produced ~0.79 g of oil at 2.25 h which can be an alternative to the available orange oil extraction methods.