Analysis of volatile oil composition of Citrus aurantium L. by microwave-assisted extraction coupled to headspace solid-phase microextraction with nanoporous based fibers.

Nanoporous silica was prepared and functionalized with amino propyl-triethoxysilane to be used as a highly porous fiber-coating material for solid-phase microextraction (SPME). The prepared nanomaterials were immobilized onto a stainless steel wire for fabrication of the SPME fiber. The proposed fiber was evaluated for the extraction of volatile component of Citrus aurantium L. leaves. A homemade microwave-assisted extraction followed by headspace (HS) solid-phase apparatus was used for the extraction of volatile components. For optimization of factors affecting the extraction efficiency of the volatile compounds, a simplex optimization method was used. The repeatability for one fiber (n = 4), expressed as RSD, was between 3.1 and 8.6% and the reproducibility for five prepared fibers was between 10.1 and 14.9% for the test compounds. Using microwave-assisted distillation HS-SPME followed by GC-MS, 53 compounds were separated and identified in C. aurantium L., which mainly included limonene (62.0%), linalool (7.47%), trans-β-Ocimene (3.47%), and caryophyllene (2.05%). In comparison to a hydrodistillation method, the proposed technique could equally monitor almost all the components of the sample, in an easier way, which was rapid and required a much lower amount of sample.