Plant-based food materials are porous and hygroscopic in nature; therefore, it contains three water environments, namely, intercellular, intracellular water and cell wall water. The intercellular water is known as capillary water or free water which is less constrained than intracellular water, considered as loosely bound water (LBW), and cell wall water, which is recognised as strongly bound (SBW). During food processing such as drying, frying, heating and cooking, optimisation of heat and mass transfer is crucial. The existing heat and mass transfer models for food processing are developed based on the concept that all of the water inside the food material is bulk water, which can act as free water that can be easily transported. This simplistic assumption has been made due to a lack of sufficient data to enable consideration of the proportion of free and bound water in plant-based food materials. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate the proportion of different types of water such as free, LBW and SBW in 11 different plant-based food materials. The water proportion was investigated using 1H NMR T2 relaxometry. The experimental results uncovers that plant-based food materials contain about 80 to 92% LBW, 6 to 16% free water and only about 1 to 6% SBW. This investigation also confirms that among the five different fruits, kiwi contains the lowest percentage of LBW while Apple contains the highest percentage of LBW. Among the vegetables, eggplant comprises the largest amount of LBW while cucumber contains least amount of SBW. An attempt was made to establish a relationship between physical properties of fruits and vegetables and the proportion of the different types of water. Interestingly, it was found that SBW strongly depends on the proportion of solid in the sample tissue whereas FW depends on the porosity of the material.Food preservation is a major concern in today's world as about one-third of the global food production is lost annually due to lack of proper processing and preservation. Food processing is very energy intensive process and it consumes about 15–20% of energy used in industrial processes. Quality of processed food is also a big concern in the industries. Therefore energy efficiency and food quality are two major concerns in the food processing industry.The current food processing techniques such as drying are unable to ensure best quality and energy efficiency as many microlevel fundamentals of hygroscopic food material are unknown. One of the major unknown is the proportions and characteristics of different types of water inside the food materials and because of this an optimised food processing cannot be designed in order to ensure high quality and energy efficiency. The existing heat and mass transfer models are based on some simplistic assumptions, for instance all of the water inside the food material is considered bulk water; which means that it acts as free water that can be transported easily. This simplistic assumption has long been used due to lack of sufficient data to enable consideration of the proportion of free and bound water. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to determine the proportion of different types of water such as free water, loosely bound water (LBW) and strongly bound water (SBW) and establish relationship between physical properties and water characteristics in hygroscopic food materials.The findings of this study will enhance the understanding of plant-based food tissue that will contribute to a better understanding of potential changes occurring during food processing and will contribute to the development of accurate heat and mass transfer models and prediction of deformation. These findings will ultimately be significant for the equipment design engineers in food processing industry.

A new, simple, and rapid separation and preconcentration procedure, for determination of Pb(II), Cd(II), Zn(II), and Co(II) ions in environmental real samples, has been developed. The method is based on the combination of coprecipitation of analyte ions by the aid of the Mo(VI)–diethyldithiocarbamate–(Mo(VI)-DDTC) precipitate and flame atomic absorption spectrometric determinations. The effects of experimental conditions like pH of the aqueous solution, amounts of DDTC and Mo(VI), standing time, centrifugation rate and time, sample volume, etc. and also the influences of some foreign ions were investigated in detail on the quantitative recoveries of the analyte ions. The preconcentration factors were found to be 150 for Pb(II), Zn(II) and Co(II), and 200 for Cd(II) ions. The detection limits were in the range of 0.1–2.2 μg L⁻¹ while the relative standard deviations were found to be lower than 5 % for the studied analyte ions. The accuracy of the method was checked by spiked/recovery tests and the analysis of certified reference material (CRM TMDW-500 Drinking Water). The procedure was successfully applied to seawater and stream water as liquid samples and baby food and dried eggplant as solid samples in order to determine the levels of Pb(II), Cd(II), Zn(II), and Co(II) ions.