Resistance heating is unique to thermic food manufacturing applications, particularly getting popularity across the food sector. Here, a prototype ohmic heating device over a capability of 6.25 kg/hr has been developed to process fish. The developed device was used combined with PID-controlled solar dryer, and the parameters have been optimized by using central composite rotatable design and artificial neural network (ANN). During the processing of hybrid drying (ohmic heating with solar drying), the selected input variables were voltage (160-200 V), salt concentration (0-2%), solar drying temperature (40-72 C), and loading density (109-190 g) to improve the drying rate (drying time, overall temperature, and final moisture content). The designed ohmic heater reduced the moisture in fish muscles from 348.5% (db) to 260.91% at the first stage of drying under optimum conditions (180 V ohmic voltage and 1% salt concentration) in the time interval of 165-300 s for all experiments, followed by final moisture content, which was reduced to 12.66% (db), and the overall drying rate was improved to 2.73 g/min at the second stage of solar drying during optimum conditions (72 C temperature and 0.672 cm 2 load density).The R 2 (determination coefficient 0.96-0.94) values, SSE (sum of square error values 0.15-025) values, and MSE (mean square values 1-8.7) were more significant for RSM than ANN. This developed resistance heating apparatus for enhancing fish drying rate and also reduced post-harvest losses, and it is considered to be a good technology for drying the fish and making a fish powder that can be further used for value-added product. Practical ApplicationsThe fish comes readily digestible; on the other hand, extremely spoilable accordingly, and fish cannot be gathered for a longer time below atmosphere circumstance, leading to enormous reap as well as commercial disadvantage. The processing of fish may impede against spoiling before reaching the consumers. Dehydration becomes a more frequent also essential approach to post-processing conservation. Fish dehydration must be promoted by farmers' stage in addition to micro-industry scale by way of convenience to frozen food locker. Hybrid or combined drying is an attraction for its nutritive values retention, uniformity of drying, reducing the microbial load, and improving product storage properties. Therefore, the present study aimed to develop an ohmic device accompanied by solar drying for preservation of Rohu fish muscles under ambient condition.

Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) were fabricated using silver doped ZnO films deposited on ITO glass by spin coating method. The crystalline nature of ZnO films was analysed with XRD and SEM technique was used for morphological studies. The XRD pattern confirmed the presence of single phase hexagonal wurtzite ZnO structure, without the presence of secondary phase. The crystallite size of ZnO decreased from 31 nm to 25 nm with increase in doping to 1.5 mol% of silver. The UV-visible transmission of the prepared ZnO film was found to be 70-90% and it decreased with increase in doping to 0.5 mol% Ag and increased in the film doped with 1.5 mol% Ag. The band gap values of the ZnO films with 0, 0.5 and 1.5 mol% of silver, determined from Tauc plot, were 3.269, 3.235 and 3.257 eV, respectively. The absorbance peaks of the N719 dye loaded ZnO films were obtained at the wavelengths 310, 350 and 538 nm. The N719 dye loaded ZnO film doped with 0.5 mol% Ag has the highest absorbance in the visible region as compared to other two samples. The fill factor values of the pure and ZnO doped with 0.5 and 1.5 mol% Ag were 0.47, 0.48 and 0.42, respectively. The short circuit density values for ZnO, ZnO:Ag0.5% and ZnO:Ag1.5% were found to be 1.50, 1.55 and 1.15 A•m/cm 2 , respectively. The calculated photon to electron efficiencies for the ZnO films with 0, 0.5 and 1.5 mol% of silver were 0.42%, 0.44% and 0.27%, respectively. Consequently future prospective of such type of dopants in ZnO film based dye sensitized solar cells seems to be bright.

No abstract

No abstract

Response surface methodology was used to determine the optimum storage conditions of malta fruits that give minimum weight loss and maximum total soluble solid (TSS) retained value. Scavenger (3–5 g), polythene thickness (75–125 gauge) and fungicide concentration (75–200 ppm) were the factors investigated. Experiments were designed according to Box–Behnken design with these three factors, including central points. For each response, a second-order polynomial model was developed using multiple linear regression analysis. Applying desirability function method, optimum storage conditions were found to be 5 g scavenger, 125 gauge polythene thickness and 200 ppm fungicide concentration.