if your doing it that way an oil/water separator is more commonly used and also a 2 neck 2 letter round bottom flask is perfect and not that expensive. if you don't have an oil/water separator, hexane or 95% isopropyl alcohol can be used as well to separate the mixture. you can recover most of the alcohol by a simple distillation and letting what you have left evaporate off.
I think you should not only chop the leaves roughly but crush the leaves. Chopping too fine leads to foam issues. Try putting them in a bag and hit them with something. Boiling them for > 4 hrs does roughly the same.
zodd0001 I'm using it because I wanted to add water without having to take apart the apparatus. Of course you could also use a simple distillation head and a liebig condenser.
I tried to extract essential oil from moringa olifera leaves by distillation method but I got more water insted of essential oil .let me know about this problem.
I couldn't find English literature, but on Wikipedia you can see the setup for the second method. The steam is made in a separate flask and lead into the distillating flask, making it way more effective.
Interesting topic. I wonder whether some similar natural product could be extracted and used further for some synthesis. Always thinking OTC chemistry...
If I had obtained a larger amount of oil, I could have extracted menthol from it. This can be used for some reactions. When the second method has a high enough yield, I want to try this.
Awww man how is this worth it!? It would take like 10,000 leaves to make a full bottle of oil. :( Having second thoughts about making my oil for perfumes.
Yes, this is definitely not worth it... That's why usually several kilos of leaves are distilled in a 10 litre flask and there's some varieties of the plant, which have several times more oil in them.
The usual oils like peppermint, lavender, citrus fruits or cloves should be no problem, as long as there are no allergies against them. I would be more careful with camphor, bitter almonds or cinnamon, but it also depends on how much of the vapors escape. Usually a distillation is performed in a way that this shouldn't be a problem. F.e. I have done this distillation in a pretty small room and large amounts of peppermint oil in the air could also have been a problem, but the cooler kept most of the vapors from escaping.
