Monitoring vitamin c content in lime juice produced by rotary evaporator / Afniza Makhtar

Project paper (Bachelor of Chemical Engineering) --- Universiti Malaysia Pahang - 2008

Limes are often grown in abundance in tropical and sub tropical countries. Their seasonal availability gives rise to gluts in the market, which means that growers do not get the full reward for their labors. Other than that, there is low demand on lime in the agricultural industry and some of the lime planter did not know where to market their raw lime fruits. Making the limes into lime juice can alleviate these problems as the process of producing it is very simple and low in cost. The objective of this research is to determine the effects of processing to the vitamin C content in producing concentrated lime juice. The rotary evaporator is used to produce the concentrated juice to make a comparison with the convectional way. The evaporation process will be done using different temperature which is 40 DC, 60 DC and 80 DC and at constant pressure of 80 mbar to obtain the best result as the nutrient especially vitamin C is very sensitive to heat. The concentrated juice produced is then analyzing using High Performance Liquid Chromatography to measure the value of the nutrition content. The results of the experiment shows that the value of vitamin C in fresh lime juice that is not going through evaporation process is highest which is 1.90835 mg/mL and lime juice evaporated at 40 °c has the least amount of vitamin C with 1.47244 mg/mL. However, the retention time to detect the vitamin C in evaporated lime juice is 1.303 minutes and it is closed to the standard samples of vitamin C which is 1.307 minutes, so it can be conclude that evaporation process may help to preserve the vitamin C content in the juice of lime. -Author