About 10-20 ml of essential oil can be extracted by one person a day using an extractor in three shifts, while the oil commands a price of between Rs 30,000 to Rs 1, 00,000.
Extraction of essential oil from fresh and cured betel leaves is of high interest for industrial applications including medicines, cosmetics chewable mouth fresher which has a very large market in the world. However, the extraction processes suffer from low economic viability and wastage in the value chain of betel leaves. Prof. Proshanta Guha and his research group from IIT Kharagpur’s Agricultural and Food Engineering Department have addressed this challenge by developing a novel betel leaf oil extraction technology that can improve the overall process efficiency. The extractor is capable of saving 44 per cent of the time and 30 per cent of the energy requirement while increasing the oil yield by more than 16 per cent, as compared to the current process and apparatus popularly used.
Describing the equipment, Prof Guha said, “It is a distillation unit with special modifications for recycling evaporated water which carries the vapours of essential oil from the distillation flask to the condensation unit. It has also a special device to minimise the formation of emulsion for increasing the recovery of essential oil.”
The extractor was envisaged to be affordable to the betel leaf growers since the cost of fabrication of the extractor was calculated to be Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 for 10L and 20L sizes, respectively. “This could be easily maintained by the small farmers and would also be sufficient for the processing of surplus leaves in any average-sized Boroj (~0.02 ha) on a daily or weekly basis. About 10-20 ml of essential oil can be extracted by one person a day using an extractor in three shifts. The price of the oil varies from Rs 30,000 to about Rs 1, 00,000 depending upon the quality of the oil, Mitha variety being costlier than the other varieties,” Prof. Guha remarked.
For large rural installations, the researchers have tried to improve the efficiency further by insulating the heat-radiating portions of the apparatus with cheap insulators. Use of fuel requirement can also be reduced substantially if the byproduct i.e. de-oiled exhausted leaves are used as fuel. They have developed Microwave heating-based equipment as well to improve the efficiency of the extraction process and to increase the yield of essential oil. In this attempt, the extraction process was completed within about 50 minutes. Thus, there was a saving of time and energy by about 76 per cent and 43 per cent respectively.
