Studies On The Extraction And Isolation Of The Essential Oil And Antioxidants From Rosmarinus Officinalis L.

Rosemarinus officinalis L. is a kind of herbal spices that originally grows in the Mediterranean basin, and now it grows all over the world. Since 1950's, researchers discovered that, many components of rosemary had strong antioxidant activity, and some of them had great medicinal value. But in our country, the researches on rosemary for their utilization were not comprehensive.The main research contents of this paper included extraction the essential oil from the rosemary, refining water-soluble and oil-soluble rosemary antioxidant and purification the active component-carnosol. And the main research conclusions were as follows:1. Different methods including steaming distillation at atmosphereric pressure, steaming distillation at reduced pressure, and simultaneous distillation and extraction (SDE) were employed to extract the essential oil from rosemary. It was indicated that the steaming distillation at reduced pressure is more suitable through comparing the yield and constituents of the oil, and the yield and activities of antioxidant obtained from rosrmary residue from which the essential oil had been removed. The yield of essential oil obtained by extracting the rosmary for 1.5h by the steaming distillation at reducd pressure was 1.26g/100g raw material, and 44 ingredients were indentified by GC-MS from the oil.2. The effect of extracting solvents, ratios of solid-to-solvent, extraction temperature, extraction time and times on the yield and total phenolics of rosemary crude antioxidant were discussed when extracting by circumfluence distillation.The effect of ultrosonic on extraction was also studied. The results showed that the yield of rosemary crude antioxidant was 21.69% and the content of total phenolics in the crude antioxidant was 25.03% when rosemary was extracted twice by 50% ethanol under ultrasonic treatment at 50℃for 40min (each time the solid-to-solvent ratios was 1:10). The methods to separate the water-soluble and oil-soluble antioxidant were also studied. The result indicated that water-dissolving method is better than petroleum extraction and concentration methods.3. The different effects of seven types of macroporous resins on decolorizating the waler-soluble antioxidant were investigated. The results showed that the resin DA201-C has the best effect at the rate of 1BV/h. The capacity of treatment can be up to 7BV and the recovery of total phenolics was 94%. After decolorization, the content of rosmaric acid in water-soluble antioxidant can up to 8.92%. And the antioxidant activity of rosemary water-soluble antioxidant was higher than ascorbutic acid and tea polyphenol (80%) at the same dosage.