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Pomelo peel-derived essential oils have been gaining popularity due to greater demand for stress relief therapy or hair care therapy. In this study, we first performed optimization of parameters in the pomelo essential oil extraction process on a pilot scale to gain better insights for application in larger scale production. Then extraction kinetics, activation energy, thermodynamics, and essential oil quality during the extraction process were investigated during the steam distillation process. Three experimental conditions including material mass, steam flow rate, and extraction time were taken into consideration in response surface methodology (RSM) optimization. The optimal conditions were found as follows: sample weight of 422 g for one distillation batch, steam flow rate of 2.16 mL/min and extraction time of 106 min with the coefficient of determination R² of 0.9812. The nonlinear kinetics demonstrated the compatibility of the kinetic model with simultaneous washing and unhindered diffusion with a washing rate constant of 0.1515 min⁻¹ and a diffusion rate constant of 0.0236 min⁻¹. The activation energy of the washing and diffusion process was 167.43 kJ.mol⁻¹ and 96.25 kJ.mol⁻¹, respectively. The thermodynamic value obtained at the ΔG° value was −35.02 kJ.mol⁻¹. The quality of pomelo peel essential oil obtained by steam distillation was characterized by its high limonene content (96.996%), determined by GC-MS.