Expression Characteristics of Chinese Cabbage

Expression of chinese cabbage was conducted in order to investigate its dewatering behavior. Chipped cabbage was packed into cylinder and pressed by piston up to the predetermined pressure on Instron-1000. The rates of dewatering were affected domintantly by the applied pressure, but not significantly by the packed amount of cabbage in the cylinder. The pressure effect was increased very abruptly at first, but the increase rate was very low at high pressure greater than 20 MPa, showing great deviation from linear dependence of flow rate on pressure in Darcy's Law. Therefore, water expression from cabbage was not Newtonian flow of water through cell wall. In fact, the squeezed water contained a lot of solid particles, showing destruction of cell wall. The content of solid particles in expressed water was only slightly lower than the dry matter content of fresh chinese cabbage, determined by drying oven method.