Quality retention of dried pineapple peels and core

The research project is conducted to satisfy two main objectives which are to study the effect of microwave power on the drying characteristics of pineapple peel and core and to observe the antioxidants activity of fresh and dried pineapple peels and core after the completion of drying process procedure. The experiment covered only on the pineapple wastes which are the peels and the cores. There are three different microwave power level are used such as 100 Watts, 300 Watts and 600 Watts in the experiment. Dried samples from these different powers are weighed every 1 minute to obtain the percentage of moisture reduction. Graph of drying curve and drying rate curve is used to interpret the obtained data that covered every minutes of the samples of pineapple peels and cores take to dry. Both dried samples of pineapple peels and core of 600W required only 21 minutes to finish the drying process while for 300W samples they took an extra 11 minutes for the cores and an additional 15 minutes for the peels. Both samples of the 100W have required the longest time which is consuming 129 minutes for the cores and 131 minutes for the peels. All of the samples were dried from an initial of 100 grams wet samples. The antioxidant activity determination section shows 600 (core) has a large amount of antioxidant content by having 68.9% inhibition followed by fresh peel (65.2%), 100W (peel) (61.3%), 300W (core)(61%), fresh core (59..5%), 300W(peel) (57.2%), 100W(core) (53.4%) and 600W(peel) (41.7%). For the total phenolic content part, the result is as the following; 600W (core) (18.57%), 300W (core) (16.29%), 100W (peel) (15.70%), 300W (peel) (9.87%), 100W (core) (8.40%), 600W (peel) (6.81%), fresh peel (4.82%) and fresh core (4.26%). The core shows a significant amount of antioxidant activity and it has to further use in industries such as pharmaceutical and biological. It is good for human health to protect against diseases. The peel also need to be considered to further use like the core as it also shows significant antioxidant values