Composition of essential oil from orange peels

In my previous article I wrote about distilling orange peels. Out of 33 Kg orange peels I distilled 100 ml essential oil.

Citrus Sinensis  var. Valencia late

From literature and a number of analyzes undertaken by IFF for students in my school I knew that the main component of the oil is limonene.

Uit: The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple van David Stewart

I thought it was interesting to analyze the composition of the oil. Last Saturday I received the analysis results.

Peak	RT (min)	Compound name	%	Norm (%)	Allergens (%)
5	13,3	b-MYRCENE	1,75	1,50 – 3,50
8	16,2	LIMONENE	93,99	93,0 – 96,0	93,99
17	20,7	OCTANAL	0,23	0,10 – 0,40
18	27,6	NONANAL	0,05	0,01 – 0,06

                                a part of the composition in mass %

The percentage of limonene, nearly 94%, is indeed high. Even higher than David Stewart in his book indicates as upper limit. Pyrenessences who performed the analyzes detected 68 different substances.

The final conclusion was that the oil composition complies with the ISO 3140: 05-2011 standard for sweet orange. The oil complies with this standard, if the analysis shows that the compunds be within a certain percentage. For limonene that is between 93 and 96%.
If you are interested in more analysis results please send an email with a request for some background to indekoperenketel@gmail.com.