Limonene Research Paper

Introduction: Limonene is a terpene that can be isolated from orange peels almost 100% in the (R)-(+)-limonene form. The essential oil from the orange peel belongs to terpenes, which are compounds that are made up of two or more five carbon units, named isoprene.1 The limonene is a monoterpene, which means it is made up of two isoprene units. Natural products are related compounds formally derived from isoprene units are terpenoids.3 The skeleton of terpenoids may differ from strict additivity of isoprene units by the loss or shift of a fragment, generally a methyl group.3 (http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iupac/class/terp.html) The purity of the oil can be determined by measuring its physical properties including optical rotation by using a polarimeter and refractive index by using a …show more content…
The percent yield that was obtained for limonene was 0.146%. The percent yield was low and states that the amount of limonene isolated from the orange peels was very small. A practical reason that may explain the low percent yield can be that there was human error when trying to collect limonene from steam distillation. There is also the possibility that there was some limonene present in the orange peels solution during the extraction stage. Some of the oil could also have been deemed lost during the decantation of the limonene in the separation portion using the separator funnel. The optical rotation was found using a polarimeter. It is known that limonene is a chiral compound, and it will rotate plane-polarized light in the polarimeter. The angle observed is the optical rotation as stated earlier. The optical rotation of the limonene oil was found to be 8