Design and Experimentation of a Laboratory Steam Distillation Setup for Extraction of Essential Oil from Eucalyptus leaves

Abstract

This paper incorporates the design, construction, and experimental run to extract essential oil by steam distillation. Eucalyptus leaves with sizes ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 cm. The steam flow rate was 3.5 kg/hr, and the volume of the extraction column was 22 lit with 0.4403m height. Designed shell & tube heat exchanger and constructed with 5 no. of tubes; with overall coefficient 384.02 W/m20C, pressure drop at the tube side was 2.121 kPa, at shell side was 0.0419 kPa. After the experimental run of 2.5 hours.; collected 40 mL of essential oil was collected from 5 kg of eucalyptus leaves.