Vol. 20, March/April 2008 Journal of Essential Oil Research/135 Received: October 2006 Revised: April 2007 Accepted: June 2007 Isolation of Indonesian Cananga Oil by Instantaneous Controlled Pressure Drop Magdalena Kristiawan, Vaclav Sobolik* and Karim Allaf, University of La Rochelle, Pole Sciences, Laboratory Mastering of Agro-Industrial Technologies, Avenue Michel Crépeau, 17042 La Rochelle, France Abstract The isolation of cananga oil by a new process, Instantaneous Controlled Pressure Drop (DIC), was investigated. This process consists in heating the dry cananga (Cananga odorata Hook. fil. et Thomson, forma macrophylla) flowers for a short time period by steam, followed by an abrupt pressure drop into a vacuum (about 5 kPa). This pressure drop provokes auto-vaporization of the volatile compounds, puffing of flowers, breaking of cell walls and cooling. The effect of the process parameters, namely number of DIC cycles (1–9), saturated steam pressure (0.2–0.6 MPa), and heating time (0.5–20 min) on the oil yield and oil composition was examined. The results indicated a significant increase of oil yield with increasing processing pressure and number of DIC cycles, however the total heating time was not a significant parameter. The DIC oil was compared with the oil obtained using steam distillation (SD). DIC exhibited better results than SD concerning rapidity (4 min versus 24 h), oil yield (2.74% versus 2.60%) and also oil quality. Key Word Index Cananga odorata f. macrophylla, Annonaceae, cananga oil, instantaneous controlled pressure drop, essential oil composition, -caryophyllene, caryophyllene oxide. 1041-2905/08/0002-0135$14.00/0—© 2008 Allured Publishing Corp. Introduction Cananga odorata Hook. fil. et Thomson is one of the most useful aromatic plants. Plants of the genus Cananga are rich in alkaloids and terpenoids which have promising pharmacological and therapeutic effects (1,2). Hsieh et al. (3) reported potent cytotoxicity of 8 alkaloids isolated from methanolic extract of C. odorata against hepatocarcinoma. Commercially, the flow- ers of C. odorata provide several grades of an essential oil to the fragrance industry, including perfumes, soaps, colognes, skin lotions and other cosmetics. In food manufacturing, this oil is employed as a minor flavor component in beverages, ice cream, candy, baked goods and chewing gum (4–7). The essential oil of C. odorata is mostly obtained by steam distillation of fresh flowers (4). The quality of oil is assessed according to the chemical composition and fragrance. Modern volatile concentrate extraction techniques such as supercritical fluid CO 2 extraction is a relative fast process providing a high quality product. Nevertheless, the high-pressure equipment (~10-30 MPa) makes this process expensive and difficult to handle (8). Moreover, this process is not selective for polar compounds and extracts also culticular waxes and lipids as do other extraction processes (9). The need of a more rational technique for the isolating high quality essential oils led to the development of a rapid and environmentally friendly isolation process: Instantaneous Controlled Pressure Drop (DIC) (10). DIC process is based on the thermo-mechanical effects induced by subjecting a raw material for a short time period to saturated steam (about 0.1 to 0.6 MPa according to the product), followed by an abrupt pressure drop towards a vacuum (about 5 kPa). This abrupt pressure drop ( p/ t > 0.5 MPa/s) provokes simultaneously auto-vaporization of volatile compounds, instantaneous cooling of the products which stops thermal degradation, expansion of the internal structure and eventually implies rupture of the cell walls. The rate of mass transfer processes is high due to the expanded porous and broken structure. The optimum processing parameters of DIC isolation technology are specific for each aromatic plant. Rezzoug et al. (10) reported that in the case of isolation of rosemary oil, one DIC cycle during 10 min at a low pressure (0.1 MPa) had an isolation efficiency of 95.8%. On the other hand, more severe DIC conditions were needed for the isolation of an oil from juniper berries. Mellouk et al. (11) needed two DIC cycles at a pressure of 0.6 MPa to isolate within 150 s 95% of the oil as against 12 h for steam distillation. The aim of this work is to study the effect the DIC param- eters on the isolation of the essential oil from dry Indonesian cananga (C. odorata f. macrophylla) flowers. The oil separated *Address for correspondence Cananga Oil