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A study of stress distribution inside a germinated brown rice (GBR) kernel during drying is important to understand the fissure formation of GBR and hence control the drying process in order to improve the quality of GBR. In this study, a finite element method performed in three dimensions in conjunction with the heat and mass balance of the drying system was developed to describe moisture, temperature and stress distributions inside GBR kernels during fluidized bed drying. The modelling was carried out using the couple of heat and mass transfer and validated with the experimental data at 90-150C.The results of moisture and temperature predictions agreed well with the experiments.During drying, tensile stress occurred at the layers close to surface while compressive stress occurred at the inner portion of a kernel. The tensile and compressive stresses increased to the highest value at about 30 s of drying, corresponding to the highest moisture gradient, and then decreased afterwards. The tensile and compressive stresses were higher at a higher drying temperature. These stress prediction results corresponded Downloaded by [New York University] at 01:36 31 July 2015 2 to the experiments which show more severity of GBR fissuring at higher drying temperatures.

A modified steaming method (steam using the revolved sieve; SRS) was applied to produce parboiled rice and the qualities of parboiled rice, namely, thermal properties (enthalpy; ΔH and degree of starch gelatinization: DG), head rice yield (HRY) and whiteness index (WI) were investigated under various steaming times and temperatures. The experimental results indicated that time and temperature during steaming step affected the parboiled rice qualities significantly. Prolonged time and increase of temperature during steaming provided the higher initial moisture content and grain temperature of rice sample after steaming, leading to longer time in drying process for decreasing the moisture content in the rice sample to 22% (d.b.). This provided the decrease of ΔH, leading to increase in the DG and resulting in the higher HRY and lower WI values.