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Lynne Wong's PhD thesis

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A sample size of 3.5 g with 75 g contact solution was henceforth adopted for pith samples.<br />

4.5 OTHER METHODS OF DETERMINING BRIX-FREE WATER<br />

So far in the literature and here, the method used to determine Brix-free water in cane fibre<br />

involves mixing dried fibre with a solution of 10° Brix sucrose solution. From the increase<br />

in Brix as detected by a refractometer, the amount of water absorbed by the fibre is<br />

calculated leading to the Brix-free water value of the fibre. In theory, the fibre can be<br />

made to contact a solution other than that of sucrose, the increase in the analyte as detected<br />

by an appropriate analytical technique, should also lead to the Brix-free water value of the<br />

fibre, provided that the technique is sensitive enough to detect the increase in the analyte.<br />

In this context, various analytes and techniques were explored, for example, lithium by<br />

flame photometry, conductivity by using a conductivity meter, chloride by amperometric<br />

potentiometric titrimetry, lactose by high performance ion chromatography and pol by<br />

saccharimeter. The details of these experiments are given in Appendix 4.<br />

All these alternative methods (except the polarimetric one) still require further<br />

development to give acceptable Brix-free water results. Although the polarimetric method<br />

showed promise, it is much more time-consuming and requires special equipment, this is<br />

the reason why the refractometric method was preferred in this study.<br />

4.6 EXPERIMENTAL<br />

The following procedure was followed to determine the Brix-free water content in fibres of<br />

sugar cane component parts.<br />

4.6.1 Materials<br />

4.6.1.1 Samples examined<br />

Brix-free water was determined in duplicate for the three replicates of four cane varieties<br />

(R 579, R 570, M 1557/70 and M 1400/86) aged 52, 44 and 36 weeks. For each age, nine<br />

cane component parts, namely dry leaf fibre and fines, green leaf fibre and fines, top fibre,<br />

rind fibre and fines and stalk fibre and pith obtained as described in Section 3.4.3 were<br />

studied.<br />

For comparison, those nine component parts of R 570 aged 52, 44 and 37 weeks harvested<br />

in 2001 were also studied.<br />

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