Effect of moisture content on engineering properties of sorghum grains

Abstract

Moisture constitutes one of the most influential factors in the conservation of sorghum grains during storage due to their relationship with the biological factors that cause postharvest damage, affecting the nutritional and economic values. For this reason it is important to evaluate the effect of moisture content on the physical characteristics of the grain in order to establish the design and operation conditions of the post-harvest processes. Accordingly, the aim of this work is to analyze the dependence on moisture content of physical properties of technological interest for the post-harvest grain sorghum stages.

Experimental results show that the moisture significantly affects the properties width, thickness, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, bulk density, thousand seed weight, porosity, angle of repose and friction coefficient both on plywood surface as metal.

Increased moisture content in the range of 0.13 to 0.29 dec. db results in increased for width, thickness, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, thousand seed weight, porosity, angle of repose and friction coefficient. For the other side, the same increase in moisture content leads a decrease in the bulk density of the grains with correlation coefficients in all cases higher than 0.99.