Design and Building a Date Syrup Extractor and Evaluating It under Different Operating Condition

Document Type : Original Research

Authors

1 Iranian Ministry of Agriculture-Jihad, Kerman Province Organization of Agriculture-Jihad, Kerman, Iran.

2 Department of Food Industry, Research and Training Center for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Kerman, Iran.

3 Iranian Ministry of Agriculture-Jihad, Fars Province Organization of Agriculture-Jihad, Shiraz, Iran.

Abstract

Dates are one of the most important agricultural products in the world, especially in Iran, and currently, their share in Iran's agricultural production is more than one million tons per year. Due to the lack of attention to by-products and the traditional method of date waste is high in our country due to the lack of attention to by-products and the traditional method of its processing. Therefore, conducting research in the field of preparation and use of products (syrup and liquid sugar) is necessary. In this research, a device for extracting date syrup was designed, built and then evaluated. Temperature, pressure and duration of syrup extraction were the main factors of the experiment. The results showed that all three factors have a significant effect on the output date syrup amount. The most produced date syrup was obtained by using the temperature of 70℃, the pressure of 9 kPa and the operation of the device for 5 h. The amount of date syrup produced by the device was about 23% based on the weight. The amount of produced date syrup increased by 3.8 times compared to the traditional method. The date syrup obtained in this research was compared with traditional syrup in terms of some qualitative and sensory characteristics, such as the percentage of total soluble solids (TSS), acidity, pH, reducing sugars, and overall acceptability of taste. The results of the variance analysis of the data showed that the effect of temperature and pressure factors on some characteristics of the produced syrup was significant.

Keywords