[Padfoot]

Hi, I'm having a bit of trouble with this question, hoping someone could help me out... 

Recently I used steam distillation to isolate the volatile oils from dill seed and was wondering what is the major advantage of using this method compared to other methods like solvent extraction.  Would cost be an issue??
thanks!

[Yggdrasil]

Well, if you specifically want to extract volatile oils, I would think that steam distilation could separate volatiles from non-volatiles while solvent extraction would not do as good of a job.

[movies]

In some ways, steam distillation is more environmentally friendly since you don't need any organic solvents.  The flip side is that you will need energy to perform the distillation, and since water has a high specific heat, this is not very efficient!

The separation following steam distillation is usually very simple because many of the volatile oils are not soluble in water, so you can just separate the two phases.  With extraction by organic solvent, you still have to remove the solvent, most likely via distillation.

[Padfoot]

In order to choose a solvent (if you were to choose one), would you nessesarily have to know what the volatile oils in dill seed are?

Big thanks to those who replied earlier by the way