Ceylon cinnamon is native spice to Sri Lanka, and it is said that most of the worlds true cinnamon (~94%) is grown in the country. Sri Lanka has been cultivating this spice since ancient times and one of the reasons for its colonization by Portuguese and Dutch was said to be this.

Although it is the world’s largest exporter of true cinnamon, countries value addition in this area has been very slow for most of the time. Some of the reasoning being traditional methods used for production and less capital being invested into the industry has held most of the cinnamon value addition to be done outside of where it gets reexported.

Sri Lankas weather conditions support the growth of different types of spices such as cinnamon, clove, cardamom and nutmeg.  Most of these spices are used in the raw or the powder form and some are used for extracting their valuable essential oils which are used for medical as well as cosmetic properties. Extraction industry in Sri Lanka is very limited and mostly uses traditional or outdated equipment such as for steam distillation. Such methods have their limitations and yield lower quality essential oils and low volume. 

I had an ambition to explore novel method extraction methods that are suitable to countries such as Sri Lanka while also being able to do the task in much more environmentally sustainable manner. While exploring different types of technologies I looked into super critical extraction method as possible solution yet when further exploring this was evident that initial investment cost is too high while operational cost would not be suitable for individual planning to do a small investment. Another possible method that hasn’t been popularly used is MAE or microwave assisted extraction.

MAE has many advantages compared to traditional or some of the other modern extraction methods. However, this has not been widely adopted which could be due to many reasons in this article I want to explore the research that I conducted together with my wife to identify a feasible method to successfully extract clove oil using MAE method.

To begin with I did not have access to such an advanced machine and found a secondhand machine for about 28000 Euros which was well away from my research budget. So, I set out to do the next best thing which is to make my own machine. After having done some research, I found another university research group who had done the same. Challenge for me was that there were no instructions as to how make such a machine so that it can be operated safely. This will be an interesting article for a different post where I will cover my adventures of making this machine.

Back to clove, so based on the research that we had done it we successfully extracted very high yield of clove oil which mostly consists of eugenol. This was a successful moment for both of us mainly because we tried many times and managed to increase the extraction yields until it couldn’t be increased any further.  

For the moment I am going to add a link to our research article which elaborates on the work done. However, I will cover the knowledge and background of this and what have learned in a different blog post.