Date

4-2010

Degree

Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Engineering

Major Course

Major in Agricultural and Bio-Process Engineering

College

College of Engineering and Agro-Industrial Technology (CEAT)

Adviser/Committee Chair

Engelbert K. Peralta

Committee Member

Kevin F. Yaptenco. Jessie C. Elauria

Abstract

The study dealt with the reduction of hydrocyanide (HCN) content in cassava leaves at the optimum drying conditions obtained through heated air drying. In drying the Box and Behnken experimental design with 15 experimental test runs was used with temperature (50°C, 60°C and 70°C), air flow rate (0.09m³/s, 0.075m³/s and 0.06m³/s)and tray loading density (100g/tray, 200g/tray, and 300g/tray) as the independent parameters. The experiments investigated the effects of the independent parameters to the response parameters that included the (1) dynamic equilibrium moisture content, (2)moisture ratio and (3) drying rate. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) showed that the drying temperature significantly affected the EMC, the drying rate and the moisture ratio at 95% level of confidence the loading density significantly affected the EMC and drying rate at 95% level of confidence whereas the airflow rate only had significant effect on the EMC. In addition, regression fitting that adequately described the experimental drying resulted in a polynomial model in the form of : MR=1.2565606-0.018566653+0.000102176t²-2.46x10⁻⁷t³ The drying experimental results showed an optimum condition of drying cassava leaves at 70°C for drying temperature, 0.06m³/s for air flow rate and 150g/tray for the loading. At this particular condition, the predicted values for the EMC, moisture ratio and drying rate were 23.46%, 0.28 m³/s and 1.13%db/min, respectively, with a desirability of 76%. The actual values of the response parameters were compared with the predicted values at optimum conditions with deviations ranging from 0.0013 to 0.278. Three (3) additional runs were conducted to verify the results of the obtained optimum conditions. The dried product of the three runs which used the optimum conditions were subjected to colorimetric method for HCN analysis. BAsed on the result, a 91..05-91.8% removal of HCN was obtained, which gave a low percentage of HCN remained in the leaves.

Language

English

LC Subject

Cassava industry.

Call Number

LG 993.5 2010 A2 C37

Document Type

Thesis

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