Annals of the University of Craiova - Agriculture, Montanology, Cadastre Series
Abstract
Distillation is a conventional method of extracting volatile oils from medicinal and aromatic plants. This is defined as a process of separating the components of a mixture that is based on the difference between the vaporization temperatures of the constituents, respectively water and oil when distilling medicinal plants. Distillation can be performed in three ways: distillation with water, by boiling the mixture of plants and water, condensation of resulting vapours and separation of oil, distillation with water and steam, in which the steam obtained by evaporating a quantity of water passes through the plant batch; steam distillation under pressure provided by an external generator, a process named in the literature and steam entrainment. The steam distillation process is applicable to many medicinal and aromatic plants that grow in our country. The extraction of volatile oils through this process depends on the different characteristics of the plants but also on the main parameters of the process, pressure and temperature, which are different
