Cold Plasma Treatment and Peleg Model Application to Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Abstract

Abstract Food preservation in the present era seems to be driven by plasma processing due to its efficiency in controlling microorganism at very less temperatures. Legumes are mostly soaked before cooking. Peleg model fitting for six chickpea cultivars after plasma treatment was studied when these were soaked in distilled water at ambient temperature. The cold plasma treatment of 40, 50 and 60 watts each with an exposure time of 10, 15, 20 minutes was applied. The Cold plasma treatment shown an increase in the water absorption rate of chickpea cultivars with respect to changing plasma parameters, but there was no change in the water absorption capacity of the samples. K1 (Peleg rate constant) decreased from 32.3 to 4.3 x 10− 3 (h % −1) for all the six chickpea cultivars consistently as plasma power and treatment time increased, which shown the increase in water absorption rate. K2 (Peleg capacity constant) ranged from 9.4 to 12 x 10− 3 (h % −1) for all the six chickpea cultivars. It did not increase or decrease consistently as plasma power and treatment time increased which shown no effect of plasma treatment on water absorption capacity. Peleg model fitting was found successful to show the correlation of water absorption of chickpea cultivars. The model fit was in the range from R2 ≥ 0.9873 to 0.9981 for all the six chickpea cultivars with increasing soaking time and cold plasma treatment.