Effect of Storage on Quality of Stone Apple Ready-to-Serve Beverage

The present study is an effort to explore the possibility of effective utilization of the raw stone apple (Aegle marmelos correa), an indigenous fruit rich in nutritional as well as medicinal qualities. As the keeping quality of the whole fruit is very less, improvement in the post harvest processing and other relevant aspects need to be studied. Value added nutraceutical ready-to-serve (RTS) have been prepared. The process parameters have been standardized with respect to biochemical, microbial and sensory acceptance. Storage experiments for RTS with treatments (control, preservative and ginger) were conducted for 8 months and quality analysis was carried out to assess the storability. The ready to serve beverage with 13% pulp, 14Brix and 0.3% acidity was considered standard based on organoleptic evaluation. The RTS blended with ginger juice fetched higher sensory acceptability. Five hundred numbers of bottles of RTS of 200 ml. capacity each could be prepared from 25 kg of stone apple. During storage of the beverage all the biochemical qualities changed with storage period irrespective ofthe treatments. The total sugar, pH and ascorbic acid ofthe RTS got reduced with storage period where as an increasing trend was observed in acidity and TSS. However, the changes were maximum in control samples. The results suggest the use of ginger juice as a source of natural preservative. After four months of storage, there was an indication of presence of total mould count and total bacterial count in the stored samples, but the population was well within the safe limits till the end of a storage period of eight months

Effect of Drying and Storage on Quality of Betel Leaves

Due to low keeping quality, betel leaves worth millions of rupees go as waste every year. If proper drying methods are scientifically standardized, the leaves can be processed at garden level and the grower can earn more profit. Therefore, the effect of different drying methods namely, sun drying, shade drying, solar drying and mechanical drying, on the quality characteristics of the leaves was evaluated. It was found that shade drying took maximum time for drying and was followed by solar drying, hot air drying (40°C), sun drying and hot air drying (50°C). However, maximum nutrient could be preserved in shade drying. The study was also carried out on storage of fresh betel leaves using traditional packaging, polyethylene packaging and ventilated polyethylene packaging. Before storing, the leaves were subjected to chemical treatment (5 ppm benzyl adenine, 8 h) and heat treatment (45°C, 1 h). It was observed that the shelf life of the leaves stored by various methods ranged between 12 and 21 days in winter and 4 to 12 days in summer. The leaves subjected to heat treatment in traditional packaging showed better performance

Hybrid bat-grasshopper and bat-modified multiverse optimization for solar photovoltaics maximum power generation

A hybrid BAT with Grasshopper (GH) algorithm and BAT-MMVO (Modified Multiverse Optimization) are exhibited for harvesting maximum power from photovoltaics (PV) using the Xilinx System Generator (XSG) implanted controller. Using a hybrid BAT-GH and BAT-MMVO algorithm, the proposed implanted controller finds the best switching pulse for the boost converter. The implanted controller, switching schemes, and the Photovoltaic (PV) supported boost converter were built using the XSG domain. The hardware implementation of the best two cases were done using a microcontroller in a smaller scale. This aims to gather the maximum amount of power by a PV array for solar irradiation and cell temperature under varied environmental situations. The PV structure in the XSG domain is used to construct the system model for prediction. The major emphasis of this work is to keep the difference of actual power and reference power as minimum. Finally, the implanted controller's performance is compared to that of other existing hybrid controllers. The performance of the proposed algorithm is found to yield good results in terms of power extraction. The theoretical and experimental results are presented. The computational efforts for the implementation of the algorithm are found to be less complex when compared to other existing methods