Physical Characteristics and Organoleptic Test of Essential Oil Extracted from Sedap malam Flower (Polianthes tuberosa) Using N-Hexane Solvent

In this work, an essential oil was extracted from from Sedap Malam (Tuberose) flower using n-hexane as the solvent. The extraction process was performed using simple soxhlet extraction method with the ratio between Sedap Malam flower and n-hexane solvent was 1:5. The physical properties, such as density and rendement values of the extracted essential oil were analyzed. The analysis results exhibited that the essential oil has average rendement value of 9.91 % and density value of 0.9275 g/mL. Additionally, organoleptic testing was also carried out to test the response of respondents toward the color and odor/fragrance of the extracted essential oil. The results showed that the responses of the respondents about the color and fragrance of the extracted essential oil were quite satisfactory. The highest responses for both color and the fragrance were belong to “Really Like” category. The extracted essential oil was also characterized using Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) apparatus and Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FT-IR) analysis.