Abstract
This research conducted to investigate the variation of the moisture content, crack ratio, and hardness of the whole and cracked brown rice after conditioning at the initial moisture content of 13, 14, and 15% with time lapse. The conditioning was conducted by increasing the moisture content of the sample to 0.4 and 0.8%. For basic information and conditioning characteristics for the development of a conditioning machine for the brown rice, predicted models of above three properties were developed using a nonlinear regression analysis of SAS with Gauss-Newton, Gradient, and DUD methods. Results of this research could be summarized as follows. 1. No moisture variation occurred after 0.5 hour conditioning. 2. The increasement of the crack ratio was 7.6 and 17.5% with the sample increased the moisture content of 0.4 and 0.8%, respectively, after 8 hours conditioning. 3. The hardness of the conditioned whole grain of the brown rice decreased 0.82 and 1,000kg$\_$f/ with the sample increased moisture content 0.4 and 0.8%, respectively, after 8 hours conditioning with respect to the non-conditioned sample. 4. The hardness of the conditioned cracked grain of the brown rice decreased 0.54 and 0.81kg$\_$f/ with the sample increased moisture content 0.4 and 0.8%, respectively, after 8 hours conditioning with respect to the non-conditioned sample. The hardness of the broken grain was about 0.81∼1.88kg$\_$f/ lower than whole grain. 5. The moisture content variation, increasing rate of the crack ratio, and hardness of the cracked and whole grain was predicted as a negative exponential function. 6. Each predicted model with the nonlinear regression analysis, which was very accurate and had a very small amount of sum of square of error between experimental value and predicted value, which could be used for predicting the physical variation after conditioning.
