The cultivation of cassava (Manihot esculenta) is widely spread in a variety of tropical countries with an estimated annual production of 291.9 million tons. The crop is the most important source of carbohydrates in producing countries. In Malaysia, cassava is mainly cultivated for starch production. Despite the economic and nutritional importance of cassava, there is only limited knowledge available regarding the overall environmental impacts of cassava starch production or the production of alternative food products like cassava crisps. This study presents an environmental assessment of different scenarios of cassava production and processing by a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The results indicate that the environmental impacts of cassava-based products can be reduced considerably with the utilization of processing residues for anaerobic digestion if the resulting biogas is used for the production of electricity and heat. In the industrial scenario, the results indicate that the highest relative reductions are achieved for cumulated energy demand (CED), global warming potential (GWP) and deforestation (DEF) with −39%, −26% and −18%, respectively, while in the advanced scenario, environmental impacts for CED, GWP, ozone formation potential (OFP) and water stress index (WSI) can be reduced by more than 10% with −281%, −37%, −16% and −14%, respectively. The impacts for global warming potential found in this study are slightly higher compared to other studies that focused on the carbon footprint of starch production from cassava, while the savings due to biogas production are similar.
To reduce the energy consumption during the drying of agricultural and food products, the optimization of the drying process with regard to the drying behavior and the quality of the end products is necessary. Therefore, much effort is spent designing and developing dryers to study the drying behavior of a wide range of products. This often results in a trade-off between measurement accuracy and the sufficient production of dried material required for the product quality analysis. Therefore, a laboratory dryer was developed consisting of three high-precision drying columns, each able to process 600 g of sample mass, and a flatbed dryer that can be loaded with 20 kg of fresh product. Drying curves could be recorded simultaneously by electronic balances in the three precision dryers and the flatbed dryer. The high-precision laboratory dryer HPD TF3+ proved to be suitable for establishing drying curves for a defined temperature, rel. humidity and velocity of the drying air.
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