Researches in quality of dried and chopped chicory herb sorting process
2019
Pruteanu, A., National Inst. of Research-Development for Machines and Installations Designed to Agriculture and Food Industry, Bucharest (Romania)
Romania’s natural potential is immense: out of the 3,700 species of plants growing in our country, the medicinal flora is represented by 800 species, of which 370 certainly have therapeutic properties for treating various diseases. The same medicinal species may have multiple effects on the human body due to the complexity of the component bioactive substances that act simultaneously on different physiological processes or states. The processing of medicinal plants is conditioned by the improvement of technologies, as well as the development of the technical base of specific machinery and equipment, especially the ones for separating on dimensional classes, from which extracts rich in bioactive substances will be obtained. The dimensional uniformity of the classes, out of which plant extracts are obtained, must present the advantages of easier processing, storage and marketing in optimum conditions. For the separation of medicinal plants resulting from their harvesting, drying and chopping in bulk, specific equipment provided with separation blocks with oscillating sieves has been developed and built. The paper presents the quality of the sorting process expressed by the degree of separation on sorts of different sizes of dried and chopped chicory herb (Cichorum intybus). The experimental researches were conducted on a chopped plant sorter, using oscillating plane sieves with different mesh sizes, different feed rates (0.0166 kg•sE−1, 0.0125 kg•sE−1, 0.0083 kg•sE−1) and different revolution speeds (1000 RPM, 900 RPM, 800 RPM) of the mechanism for actuating the sieves. The experimental results obtained from sorting the chicory herb were processed and interpreted using polynomial regression functions.
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