Abstract: In the paper, the volatile oils from the leaves of Eupatorium fortunei were extracted by supercritical CO2 or microwavefor their optimum extraction conditions. The uniform design experiments were used to optimize the SFE CO2 conditions, and theoptimal conditions were determined: pressure 15MPa, temperature 32℃, CO2 flowing rate 20kg/h and time 80min. The optimumconditions of the microwave extraction were obtained by orthogonal experiment: radiation time 160s, microwave power 720W,volume of solvent 300ml and volume of washing solvent 30ml. The volatile oils obtained by supercritical CO2 were microwaveand steam distillation, extraction rate 2.75%, 3.76% and 0.76% respectively. The results showed that the extraction rate ofmicrowave extraction was highest and its process simpler, but its quality was worse than the volatile oils extracted by supercriticalCO2 while steam distillation quality is the best.

Key words: Eupatorium fortunei, supercritical CO2 extraction, volatile oil, microwave extraction, steam distillation