Enhancement of Sugar Content through Progressive Freeze : Effect of Initial Concentration

Abstarct

For the purposes of commercialization, coconut water (CW) needs to be transported thousand miles away which involves high costs of storage, handling and shipping. Therefore, a new concentration technique is required to eliminate portion of the water from the CW and henceforth reduce the related cost. As Progressive Freeze Concentration (PFC) could retain the nutritional compounds, it was applied to concentrate CW and enhance its
sugar content. In PFC system, only a single block of ice is formed as a layer on the cooled surface. A coil stainless steel crystallizer was used as FC unit to investigate the enhancement of sugar content in CW. The effect of initial concentration of CW was then investigated on the performance of the PFC system through the Effective Partition Constant (K) value and increment of sugar content. It was found that lower initial concentration yielded lower K,
which is favourable and high sugar content. The best K achieved was of 0.3101 and the highest sugar content increment acquired was 53% with the range of initial concentration investigated (3 to 5%Brix).

Click this link for view full paper: full manuscript_2 draft (Naimah-ICOST2013)
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