Water sorption behaviour of commercial furcellaran

Kairit Eha; Aleksei Kaleda; Anne Menert; Katrin Laos

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11056

Water sorption behaviour of commercial furcellaran

Heliyon. 2022 Oct 13;8(10):e11056. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11056. eCollection 2022 Oct.

Authors

Kairit Eha¹, Aleksei Kaleda², Anne Menert³, Katrin Laos¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 15, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia.
² Center of Food and Fermentation Technologies, Akadeemia tee 15A, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia.
³ Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, Ülikooli 18, 50090 Tartu, Estonia.

Abstract

Water sorption isotherms are important tool for designing the technological processes and predicting stability and shelf life of food. The aim of the work was to determine the water sorption isotherms of commercial furcellaran at different temperatures (20, 35 and 50 °C) using a gravimetric method under different levels of relative humidity (19-95%). The experimental data obtained have been interpreted in the terms of various isotherm models and it was found that the best results were obtained with the Peleg model (P < 2.1%; RSME <0.01; R² = 1.00). The obtained isotherms followed the type II pattern and, in all cases, the sorption capacity increased with increasing water activity and decreased with increasing temperature. The maximum net isosteric heat for adsorption and desorption was 938.9 and 988.6 J g ^-1, respectively, at an equilibrium moisture content of 0.05 g_w g_db ^-1. The net isosteric heat of sorption decreased exponentially with increasing moisture content and approached zero at 0.26 g_w g_db ^-1 for adsorption and 0.32 g_w g_db ^-1 for desorption. The developed mathematical relationships can be used to optimize the drying processes and storage conditions of furcellaran.

Keywords: Furcellaran; Modelling; Net isosteric heat of sorption; Sorption isotherm.