Foods and Raw Materials (Jun 2016)
PHYSICAL PRINCIPLES OF PROCESSING OFF-GRADE BUCKWHEAT
Abstract
Currently, there is deterioration of the quality of incoming buckwheat supply. Intensification of harvesting processes, due to application of new combine harvesters aimed at expanding the moisture range of harvested grain, leads to a grain increase at farms and this bulk is kept under unregulated conditions on large open areas. The lack of centralized storage, conditioning and grain drying leads to the fact that producers have to deal with post-harvest handling and storage, though they do not have grain drying units, cleaning equipment and the required number of granaries. In addition, grain storage requires considerable financial costs; therefore not every producer can meet the necessary technological requirements of grain receiving and post-harvest processing. The incoming grain has another moisture content, hard-separable impurities, filmness and content of germinated grains. Processing of such grains using standard practice is costly or this grain is used for feeding purposes. Off-grade grain batches (which don’t conform to the requirements of regulatory documents) collected in the foothills of the Altai Territory were chosen for research. The research was carried out for the most common grain parties: with moisture of 17.0-22.0%, with hard-separable impurities above 2.0%, with filmness not more than 19.0%, and buckwheat containing germinated grains. The results of the research allowed offering technology, the distinguishing feature of which is the absence of preparation grains phase before processing. The proposed technology allows to process off-grade buckwheat in order to produce peeled buckwheat and guarantee profitability. The obtained data prove significant advantage of the proposed technology. Economic efficiency of grain processing with four defects is calculated. It is stated that the cost of processing off-grade grain on the proposed technology is much lower than the standard technology of producing buckwheat according to the requirements.
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