Commercial Floriculture

Treating the flowers with the solvent

• The fully opened flowers are treated with the solvent so that all the odoriferous material in the flowers gets dissolved in the solvent.
• In this process, the solvent penetrates the flowers and dissolves the waxes, albumin and colouring matter also, which have to be removed later to get pure perfume oil.
• In solvent extraction process, the most important factor is the quality of solvent used.
• Though there is no solvent possessing all the qualities, the commercial food grade hexane has found to satisfy many of the requirements of good solvent and hence used in large scale for the extraction of floral concrete throughout the world.
• Food grade hexane available in the market has to be purified before using it as solvent.
• Food grade hexane is treated with liquid paraffin at 5% and distilled at 700C. The residue which is not evaporating at 700C is rejected as impurities.
• The purified hexane is a colourless liquid with a boiling point ranging from 600C to 800C.
• The flowers are treated with purified hexane at 2 liters per kg of flower for about 30 minutes.
• The complete extraction of the perfume from the flowers can also be ensured by slowly rotating the container having the flowers and solvent for about 20 minutes in the rotary type of extractor.

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