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Moisture Analysis Options for Snack Food Manufacturing
Introduction
Moisture analysis using an air-oven method typically takes at least an hour to perform. This is longer than the mix cycle of most dough-state, extruded snacks. Because of the short mixing period of snack food doughs, true at-line process control has historically been nearly impossible. For this reason, moisture testing is typically only performed on final product as a quality control measure. Various rapid, indirect techniques (NIR, FT-IR) have been introduced, but are limited in the types of products that can be tested, and require expensive calibrations for each sample type. Infrared moisture balances decrease test time compared to traditional oven methods, but still require up to 25 minutes to completely dry samples with moderate moisture levels. Furthermore, infrared moisture balances struggle to completely dry high-moisture doughs and liquids, which tend to recondense inside the drying cavity.
The SMART 6TM moisture/solids analyzer is uniquely designed to handle the wide variety of sample types in snack food manufacturing, from dry powder ingredients to high-moisture doughs, hydrates, and liquid brews. The SMART 6 utilizes dual-frequency energy, specifically microwave and infrared, to rapidly analyze moisture content. Low-frequency microwaves penetrate the entire sample to rapidly remove volatiles through dipole rotation, while high-frequency infrared energy evenly heats the surface through molecular vibration. The two energy sources work in unison, providing benefits over microwave-only and infrared-only analyzers, with results in approximately 3 minutes. For rapid moisture/solids and fat analysis in less than 5 minutes, simply pair the SMART 6 with CEM’s ORACLETM. The SMART 6 comes pre-programmed with a library of optimized drying methods for pairing with the ORACLE.
This study demonstrates that the SMART 6 can rapidly analyze a wide range of snack food products for moisture with an average difference of less than 0.02%, compared to reference methods.