Rapid, clean and eco-friendly microwave extraction process for the determination of fat and oil: application to green vegetables

摘要

Soxhlet apparatus is routinely used by analysts for sample preparation prior to gas chromatography analysis. In this work, traditional Soxhlet extraction (SE) and innovative Microwave Integrated Soxhlet (MIS) have been compared and evaluated for their effectiveness in the extraction of oil from green vegetables. The microwave method offers important advantages over traditional alternative, namely; shorter extraction times (30 min. against 8 hours for SE); comparable yields (1.2 percent for cardoon, 7.2 percent for cabbage and 2.6 percent for mallow using MIS or SE); environmental impact (energy cost is fairly higher to perform SE than that required for rapid MIS extraction); and cleaner features (as solvent is almost totally recycled by MIS).