There is small quantity of extracted essential oil using hexane as the solvent, and the extracted sample contain oil and the hexane, it's a 5 mL sample. Is there a method to remove hexane and get the essential oil from the mixture ?
Yes. Just put the Hexane sample in the fume hood face and let it evaporate overnight. You will only have the oil in the morning since Hexane is very volatile.
Dear Bruce,
The thing is the oil is also volatile that the issue.
Damn! This also means you don't know the volatility of the oil. The procedure I suggested above will work for crude oil, food oils, mineral oil...
Hexane has a boiling point of 69 Celsius and a freezing point of -95 Celsius but your oil may be close. Try freezing the sample, and once solid then leave it out at room temperature (you might get lucky) or you can decant off the fraction.
Dear Bruce,
Yes, that is case i don't know the exact volatility of the oil.
Thank you very much and i'll try the way you suggested.
You can replace hexane with pentane, which is easier to distill. To do this, pass your sample through a column of silica gel. Eluent is pentane.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Phytochemistry
- Extracts