Estudo sobre os métodos de extração de óleos essenciais: uma revisão integrativa

Abstract

The present work has as its theme the chemistry of natural products aiming at the study of the different methods of extracting essential oils. Essential oils are constantly used in therapeutic processes, due to their healing properties, and have been attracting the interest of several researchers, mainly due to the development of drugs whose active principles are special metabolites extracted from the plant. The methodology consisted in the elaboration of a descriptive research, which used as a research instrument the literature review through bibliographic research. As a result, it was observed that the hydrodistillation and steam distillation methods present good yields, are simple and economical. Soxhelt organic solvent extraction is more widespread, also easy to use, but it can compromise the purity of the material by extracting other plant compounds in addition to the oil. Extraction by supercritical fluid using CO² makes it possible to extract a higher quality oil because there is no contact with any type of solvent. The flowering method is an artisanal method and, due to the slowness of the process, it has low yield. Cold pressing is also one of the oldest methods and has a low yield compared to the others. Thus, each methodology has different characteristics that can significantly interfere in aspects such as volume, yield, density, purity, quality of the oil obtained, etc.