I have a steady flow of orange/lime and lemon peels at my disposal, so I have been researching ways to extract the Limonene.

The first and most obvious was steam distillation. After some searching, I found this YouTube video explaining the use of Liquid CO2 to extract limonene straight from orange peels, which is much more economical and seems to produce better results.



So it seems pretty simple, but the scale is small, and I am not sure what the tube is made of. If it is made of glass, it seems the tube would break instead of deforming as a result of the pressure and subsequently letting the CO2 out of the tube.

If anyone has ideas on how this could be achieved on a larger scale, would love to hear it, this also seems like a great way to purify limonene which you have already used - allowing you to re-use limonene over and over again.

The tube in this video is a 15ml Falcon that is made out of polystyrene.

This is a neat method as long as one takes care not to let the tube explode! It is pretty nice to see the liquid CO2 extracting limonene.

This can be definitely scaled up in a bottle that can close hermetically , has a pocket for packing material and has a fair amount of elasticity to withstand the extreme pressure of liquid/gaseous CO2.

A hermetically closed percolator setup with loads of dry ice pached on top of the orange peels seems like the ideal design for large scaling that. But please be very careful.


EDIT: It won't work with used limonene which will require distillation to get rid of any non-volatile crap.

Excellent find Narmz! This could be the beginning of something magnificent.

Here is a pdf that explains it all.