DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A PROTOTYPE RADIO FREQUENCY APPLICATOR FOR POST BAKING OF BISCUITS

Abstract

Indian Biscuits Corporation appears to be the biggest among all the food corporations and has a turnover of around .3000 corers. Indian subcontinent is known to be the second biggest maker of biscuits, the first being USA. The biscuits per capita utilization in India is 2.0 kg and ranked 3rd after USA and China amongst the global biscuits producers. Biscuit making process have stages like mixing, forming, baking, cooling and packaging. The baking method is the main energy overwhelming and quality deciding procedure. In conventional baking process, checking emerrges because of the development of worries in the item piece. These burdens are caused by differential dampness content between the external surface and the middle bone of the biscuit and causes breakage. Radio Frequency Post Baking is a proven result to this difficulty. RF heaters are like microwave ovens where items (food, biscuits, paper, materials etc) going through the microwave oven (heater), are subjected to an immediate or volumetric warming process as a radio frequency (RF) energy source. In the simplest type of RF tool, the material to be warmed is placed between two metal plates which make an electrical capacitor. The material turns into a lossy dielectric and attracts energy from the RF Generator which is associated over the two plates. Main aim of this study was to design, development and testing of a prototype RF applicator for post baking of biscuits by studying dielectric properties of biscuits and nume