Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/550313
tobaccoasia 57 How Can Sharing Knowledge Help Shape a Brighter Future? Through practical training in best agronomic practices on AOI model farms, Producers in India learn ways to improve the safety of their operation while maximizing quality, yield and net income. It's part of our commitment to unite the world under One Vision of action-oriented social responsibility. See Our Vision for Positive Change AOIsustainability.com ACTION-ORIENTED SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACTION-ORIENTED SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY the answer. "Our microwave technology is able to measure the moisture not only at the surface but also in the core," asserted Tews. A few tweaks never hurt The traditional oven-drying method – also called loss-on-drying method – still is regard- ed by many to be more accurate than other available technologies due to its miniscule error margin spread. However, it usually measures not only the actual water moisture content but also other volatile substances that are evaporated together with it. "It is therefore more correct to say 'oven volatiles' than moisture, as moisture is only one of the constituents which is dried off in the oven," said Perten's Tordenmalm. However, his company's proprietary diode array NIR technology is able to distinguish between water moisture and other volatile substances. But it is exactly these evaporating non-water components – including nicotine, glyc- erin, propylene glycol, and others – that can raise another issue for analyzers utilizing the loss-on-drying method. "Nicotine and other fleeting substances are a big problem, as they escape the tobacco during heating and may store off in the instrument and its elec- tronic parts," said Markus Löns, senior sales director, food international at Brabender GmbH & Co. KG, a major manufacturer of food testing equipment also active in the tobacco processing arena. His company's solution for this issue was to isolate the drying chamber in its popular Model MT-C from the rest of the instrument so vapors won't be able to settle in the electronics, thus affecting the machine's functionality and life cycle. Always a step ahead Meanwhile, NDC Technologies (NDCT), which currently only markets one moisture analyzer, its Model TM710e, advocates that measuring tobacco moisture requires a highly sophisticated chemo-metric model to adequately address and represent the huge variety of product types. According to Dr. Ian B. Benson, the company's vice president of business development, there even exist tremendous variations within individual prod- uct types. For instance, flue-cured tobacco can be low to high in nicotine, low to high in Perten's DA 7400 analyzing tobacco sample