Rice Grain Dehydration Enhanced by Sheath Plasma
Authors/Creators
- 1. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Kasetsart University, Chatuchak, Bangkok 10900, Thailand
- 2. The Demonstration School of Ramkhamhaeng University, Faculty of Education, Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkapi, Bangkok 10240, Thailand
Contributors
Contact person (2):
Project leader:
- 1. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Kasetsart University, Chatuchak, Bangkok 10900, Thailand
- 2. The Demonstration School of Ramkhamhaeng University, Faculty of Education, Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkapi, Bangkok 10240, Thailand
Description
Humidity in crops is a key factor considered for the food quality preservation. Various drying processes are implemented as an unavoidable post-harvest process. In this work, we would like to introduce the use of low pressure plasma to electrostatically dry the crop samples, i.e. raw rice (Oryza sativa L.) grains. We conducted several preliminary tests in order to compare the average weight loss of the humid raw rice grains, which underwent the 200W microwave and plasma heatings separately. Based on the preliminary results, we found that the microwave drying was still faster the plasma drying by around 51%. However, we suggest that the use of plasma drying leads to the cost effectiveness and the dried crops with the longer lifetime. This is because during plasma drying, sterilization by plasma implementation is ongoing. No extra process and no chemical preservative is required.
∗ This manuscript mainly consists of the work contributed and presented in ESCAMPIG XXIV, Glasgow, Scotland, July 17-21, 2018, but it is not published on the conference website.