SAMPLE PREPARATION FOR VOLATILE OIL ANALYSIS OF CASSIA BARK

We established that the choice of the laboratory mill has little effec t on steam-distillable volatile oil (VOSD) analysis of Cassia bark whe n reasonable care is used in preparing single samples. When multiple s amples are milled, caution is advised to avoid temperature increase. D ata from 11 laboratories are presented for 4 test samples. Participati ng laboratories milled 200 g samples, and the variation of the resulti ng VOSD in the ground spice could not be attributed to the different g rind-size profiles measured. The estimated systematic error due to typ e of mill was 0.04 mL/100 g. This represents a relative standard devia tion of 2.2% for the lowest average volatile oil levels.