Extraction of Essential Oil from Neem Seed by Using Soxhlet Extraction Methods

Extraction of essential neem oil from neem seed was carried by soxhelt extraction method using different organic solvents and parameters. Physico-chemical property of the extracted oil was also determined by using classical wet chemical method. Result revealed that, soxhlet extraction using hexane has 40.35%; using ethanol-hexane mixture of 60:40% volume proportion has 43.71%, using ethanol 42.65% and using methanol 42.89%. For all solvent type particle size has 355μm, extraction time 1hr up to 3hrs and applied constant and varies temperatures .At smaller extraction time, hexane produced oil yield greater than from ethanol and methanol. Actually, ethanol not produced oil at one hour extraction time. Thus, by effective determination of factors like particle sizes, solvent type, temperature, and time it is possible to investigate the result on the quality and quantity of neem oil. Surprisingly, mixtures of Ethanol and Hexane gave admirable results. Predominantly, ethanol-hexane mixtures of 60:40, and 40:60% (volume proportions) gave better oil yields of 44%, and 41.2% respectively than that of hexane (40.35%) at 3 hours of process time.