ESSENTIAL OIL EXTRACTION FROM LEMONGRASS (CYMBOPOGON CITRATUS) FOR MOSQUITO REPELLENT WALL PAINT

• Main Author: Nur Syazana Binti Yunus, -
• Format: Final Year Project Report
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak 2022
• Subjects: TP Chemical technology
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/39373/1/Nur%20Syazana%20ft.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/39373/

The demand for natural mosquitoes repellent has been growing in response to the public's concern on the toxicity effect of chemical-based mosquito repellent. Natural mosquitoes repellent generated by the utilization of essential oil (EO) from a plant has been proven to have high efficacy with no harmful effect towards human health and environmental. Lemongrass, or Cymbopogon Citratus essential oil which contains unique chemical composition like citral, citronellal, geranial, neral, limonene, and etc. gives excellent performance of repellency on numbers of mosquitoes, which are as effective as DEET. Hence, in this study, the lemongrass EO was extracted by using two extraction techniques of steam distillation and soxhlet extraction with variation of extraction temperature. Then, the EO extracted from these two extraction techniques were analysed by using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) to confirm the chemical composition of the lemongrass essential oil. Based on the analysis, the lemongrass EO extracted from steam distillation under 100℃ extraction temperature gave the best quality and purity of lemongrass EO with highest percentage of repellence constituents presented. Thus, the mosquito repellent wall paint was made by using the lemongrass EO of the best quality. The water-based wall paint was used and mixed thoroughly with 20% vol. and 40% vol. of lemongrass EO. Finally, the repellency testing of the mosquito repellent wall paint at two different EO volume concentrations was conducted by field testing for three continuous hours. The result was observed and recorded where the 20% vol. of lemongrass EO in the mosquito repellent wall paint gave 82% repellent effectiveness. Meanwhile, the mosquito repellent wall paint with 40% vol. of lemongrass EO gives the highest repellent effectiveness up to 94%.