Abstract
Eucalyptus oil is a product of secondary metabolism of trees which is extracted mostly by itsleaves. It holds a long history of use against respiratory infections due to its antibacterial,antifungal and antiviral properties and also acts as a fragrance in perfumes and as aflavouring agent in certain food items.A survey was conducted in the first phase of this study with the Customs Department toidentify the existing market potential for Eucalyptus oil in Sri Lanka. Results revealed thatthe export is far below in compared with the imports. Although a few local oil extractors arepresent, their production is highly insufficient to meet even the local market demand, hencemost of the Eucalyptus oil demand is fulfilled by importing large quantities from Australia,China, India and United Kingdom. Therefore if the optimum conditions are identified,commercial level extraction of Eucalyptus oil will be an ideal opportunity of earning asignificant income for both government and private sectors because they manage nearly32,000 ha of Eucalyptus plantations in Sri Lanka. This will create much benefit, especiallyfor the owners of Eucalyptus plantations grown above 1,500 m from mean sea level, becauseharvesting of those plantations have been banned.Hydro and steam distillation are the only two methods used in Eucalyptus leaf oil extractionin commercial scale. Therefore the second phase of the study was designed to identify thebest distillation method and required optimum physical conditions in Eucalyptus leaf oilextraction. Fresh leaves were collected from the middle of the canopy of a young E.microcorys plantation at Demodara and those were air dried under shade. Both steam andhydro distillation methods were conducted parallely for 250 g of leaves, using a small-scaledistillation apparatus for 3 hours. The effect of the particle size of the leaves (full leaf and4.0, 2.0, 0.2 cm) and leaf to water ratio (1:4, 1:6 and 1:8 (w/v)) were examined. Altogether 24different treatments were used with three replicates. According to one-way ANOVA, 16different combinations of the tested variables had significantly higher oil yields. Among themthere were 11 steam distillation methods and five hydro distillation methods. However, thebest average oil content was yielded by the hydro distillation, used with leaves cut into 4.0cm and with 1:4 leaf water ratio.Keywords: Eucalyptus leaf oil, Distillation, Eucalyptus microcorys, Oil yield
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