RESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of technologies and conditions on volatile oil yield extracted from Rhizoma Curcumae. METHODS: Water Extraction coupling Rectification (WER) and Steam Distillation (SD) technologies were applied to extract the volatile oils based on orthogonal table L9 (3(3)) to find out optimized condition. RESULTS: Variance and range analysis of orthogonal experiment results showed that the best conditions of WER and SD were as follows: ultrasound 0 h, extract 12 h with 8 (or 12 fold water for SD) fold water amount. Paired T test on the yields of the oils indicated that the oil yields prepared by WER and SD were significantly different. GC-MS analysis characterized 12 common compounds,which occupied 97.19% (SD) and 92.25% (WER) of the ones identified, respectively. Moreover, the relative percentage of the common constituents were almost the same. CONCLUSION: Ultrasound is not good for extracting volatile oil from Rhizoma Curcumae. WER could not only increase the oil yield of Rhizoma Curcumae, but also keep the quality of the oils accord with that extracted by SD.