| Summary: | The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of using various power level and different ratio of fruit to water in microwave sterilizer in order to acquire the shortest time of the fruit to be completely detached from the spikelet. Normally, the palm oil fruits processing uses steam heating for sterilization of oil palm fruit brunches. The conventional steam treatment of sterilization produces large amount of waste water from the palm oil mill process. Also, this process is classifying as crucial process with the intention of inactivate the lipolytic enzyme as prevention to the increase of free fatty acids (FFA) in oil. Therefore, microwave irradiation is used in this research for solving this problem and improving of palm oil fruit quality prior to extraction of crude palm oil (CPO). The optimal condition was 800W for 6 minutes of 100% strip of fruit from the spikelet with 1:0.5 ratio by means of 4.08% of FFA. It can be concluded that microwave radiation is suitable for quick detachment of the fruitlet from the spikelet and fruit loosening performed without kernels started to turn brown and appeared dehydrated. Throughout the trial, the quality of the oil extracted from the microwave sterilized spikelets in terms of the FFA percentage was acceptable. The quality of the oil is excellent, with free fatty acids of the crude oil generally below 5%. © 2017, Malaysian Society of Analytical Sciences. All rights reserved.
|
|---|