Comparison of microwave hydrodistillation and solvent-free microwave extraction for extraction of agarwood oil

Production of agarwood (Aquilaria malaccensis) oil still potential to be developed in Indonesia. Agarwood oil was one of commodity that provides an important role for the country's foreign exchange earnings because the selling price was very high. However extraction of agarwood oil is currently still using the conventional method such as hydrodistillation which takes a long time to produce oil with good quality. In this research, the extraction of agarwood oil was done using microwave hydrodistillation and solvent-free microwave extraction method. The optimum conditions of the parameters that affected the agarwood oil extraction using both of methods as follows: Microwave power of 450 W, ratio between mass of raw material with volume of distiller (F/D) of 0.01 g/mL, ratio between mass of raw material with volume of solvent (F/S) of 0.4 g/mL and raw materials that have powder size. Solvent-free microwave extraction method was an effective method to extract agarwood oil which with shorter extraction time can produced a higher yield of 5.95 times compared to microwave hydrodistillation method. In addition, based on the analysis of electric consumption and environmental impact, solvent-free microwave extraction method showed a smaller amount when compared with microwave hydrodistillation method. And also based on GC-MS analysis, the solvent-free microwave extraction method produces better quality of agarwood oil than the microwave hydrodistillation method. So based on that, the use of solvent-free microwave extraction method for agarwood oil extraction has been suitably used as a new green technique.