Abstract:
The traditional food products of various regions are now developing into
food processing business. Marketing of these kind of culinary products will
enhance the more income, jobs as well as minimizes post-harvest. Traditionally
rice noodles or idiyappam is prepared by pressing the rice flour water mix through
the die with holes of required diameter manually. It is a time consuming and energy
intensive laborious process. There are motorized idiyappam machines are
available. But such motorized extruders are complicated in design, energy intensive
and lacking in precision with more moving parts and associated gear mechanisms.
Pneumatic engineering is based on the compressed air or compressed inert gas. In
this study a pneumatic extruder was developed for the production of fortified rice
noodles, which composed of frame assembly, pneumatic cylinder, compressor, air
filter regulator, double solenoid valve, pneumatic pipes/tubes, pneumatic fittings,
timer, flow control valve, extruder die, dough cylinder , noodle collecting plate,
plate holding section and DC motor. In order to evaluate the developed system
towards extrusion fortified rice noodles, the effect of process parameters which
would influence the capacity, energy and rate of extrusion such as pneumatic
pressure of 600, 700 and 800 kPa, speed of the piston 0.05,0.06 and 0.07 m/s,
jackfruit seed flour proportion in the blend of 5, 8 and 11% were studied. Physical
properties, cooking properties, nutritional profile and sensory scores were
analysed. The optimised operating condition of pneumatic pressure, speed of the
piston and jackfruit seed flour proportion in the blend were found to be of 800 kPa,
0.07 m/s, 5 % respectively. From this study, it may be derived that the jackfruit
seed flour fortified rice idiyappam prepared through the pneumatic extruder
developed under this study at optimised operating condition of 800 kPa of
pneumatic pressure, speed of the piston 0.07 m/s and 5% fortification of jackfruit
seed flour in the rice powder resulted in production of higher capacity of noodles
at lower energy level and higher rate of extrusion. These noodles were found to be
on par with cooking and physico-chemical qualities, nutritionally rich and
organoleptically superior with that of traditionally prepared rice idiyappa m
