Essential Oil from Extraction of Pepper Leaves (Piper Nigrum L.) using Microwaves

Pepper plants are a commodity with high economic value. However, the problem is that pepper leaves are not widely used. When pruning for rejuvenation, 75% of pepper leaves are just thrown away. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to use and process pepper leaves into essential of pepper oil. One method of extracting essential pepper oil is a microwave-assisted extraction process. The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of extraction time on the yield of essential oil derived from pepper leaves. Pepper leaves that are wilted for 7 days are chopped to ± 1-2 cm, carry out extraction using a microwave using 200 ml water as a solvent, for 60, 90, 120, 150, 180 and 210 minutes. The research results showed that the optimum yield of essential pepper oil was obtained of 0.5937% at 180 minutes extraction process. The characteristic of essential oil derived from pepper leaves were obtained: a specific gravity of 0.8710, a refractive index of 1.4873 and an acid number of 0.3809 mg KOH/g.