Effect of temperature on water vapor sorption on commercial desiccant and rice husk-CaCl₂ composite desiccant

Many efforts have been made to control the moisture in the package by the addition of the active ingredients which absorb this moisture. In the modern retail, moisture or water vapor absorber, known as desiccant has been widely used to extend the shelf life of the food product. Composite desiccants comprising the high active ingredient has been developed to improve the performance of single absorber material in absorbing and controlling moisture in the food package. The purpose of this research was to observe the effect of temperature storage in moisture sorption of commercial desiccants (silica gel and active clay) comparing to the composite desiccant of rice husk-CaCl₂. This research proved that the sorption ability of these desiccants were different, and it was influenced by the temperature of the storage. The results showed that rice husk-CaCl₂ composite dessicant possessed the highest absorption capacity especially at temperature of 40 °C with value of 1.2342 g H₂O/g desiccant for 7 days of storage. The increase of temperature has been resulted on increasing absorption rate (k), for example, rice husk-CaCl₂ composite dessicant, the k value was 0.2587 g H₂O/g desiccant/day at 30 °C, 0.7828 g H₂O/g desiccant/day at 40 °C and 0.9562 g H₂O/g desiccant/day at 50 °C. It looks that the moisture absorption followed pseudo second order for all treatment with R² at 99% for almost all treatments.