ABSTRACT

The importance of plants to man cannot be overemphasized. From the agricultural sector to the areas of medicine, the benefits of plants have threaded the fabrics of our modern world. Plant's "essence" is the source of these benefits. This essence could be extracted as volatile oils . These oils are widely known as essential oils. Various methods can be used for extracting these oils. Some of these include supercritical fluid extraction, effleurage, microwave extraction, solvent extraction, hydro-distillation, etc. While the efficiency and compatibility of these methods vary, hydro-distillation remains the most popular and cost effective, hence suitable for small scale farmers. In this project, a steam distillation equipment for the extraction of essential oils, using ginger rhizomes as the plant material, was designed and fabricated. The design was based on empirical studies and experimental setups in literature. Design calculations were carried out for parameters like volume and height of distillation still, pressure, temperature, mass and energy balance, condensation coefficient and steam flow rate. After fabrication, the equipment was tested to see its efficiency in extraction. Whereas a theoretical oil yield of 23m1 was obtained and used as the maximum level for the actual yield, a quantifiable amount of ginger oil could not be obtained, the reason being for the different faults that occurred in the machine. The heat involved in increasing the temperature of water used to 100°C was obtained as 470.95kJ; while the heat involved in vaporization was obtained as 2595.55kJ.