Investigating factors affecting the distillation process of agarwood oil
Abstract
Agarwood oil is a product of very high economic value which is mainly extracted from agarwood chips by means of the distilling method. Yet, the process of distilling agarwood oil is very complicated and its efficiency depends on many factors. In this article, a hydro-distillation model was designed and constructed with its capacity output of 5 kg agarwood chips per batch. Then, experiments were carried out based on this model in order to investigate three major influential factors affecting the oil yield from the distillation process: distillation time, heating capacity of the burner, and soaking time. The results of the study show that the amount of extracted oil reached the highest level of 4,5 mL per batch - 5 kg agarwood chips under conditions of 30-hour extraction time, 3 kW heating capacity, and 21-day soaking time. Accordingly, the distillation yield reached 0,09%.
Moraref