As a function of pressure increase from 10 to 30MPa, the solubility of oil in SC-CO2 repeatedly increased. Applying SFE at 30MPa resulted in no significant increase in the yield of the extract even with contact time of 3 h (solvent/solid ratio of approximately 6). The maximum yield approached with SFCO2 was 6.65 g extract from 100 g ground cardamom. This value is significantly lower than 7.9 reported by Gopalakrishnan and Narayanan [7] using SF-CO2 at 10–60MPa and temperature between 313 and 333 K, but higher than the 5.5 g/100 g reported by Marongio et al. [8] who performed the SF-CO2 extraction at 9–11MPa and 313–323 K. The variation in the maximum yield achieved in different studies is most likely due to variations in the oil content of the raw materials (cardamom seeds) used, not
to the applied SFE conditions.