Abstract
Cocoa powder is an important ingredient in the confectionery industry and, mannitol is an alternative sugar alcohol. In this work, mannitol powder was mixed with cocoa powder and compacted into tablet form via the uniaxial die compaction process. The frictional, compaction, tablet mechanical and disintegration properties were studied due to their importance in characterizing the behaviour of the tablets during processing and its final product characteristics at varying mannitol contents. The composition of mannitol in the mannitol-cocoa tablet varied at 95% w/w, 50% w/w and 5% w/w, while pure 100% w/w mannitol and cocoa tablets were set as controls. The compaction pressures used in making the tablets varied at 37.67 MPa, 75.34 MPa, 113.01 MPa, 150.68 MPa and 188.35 MPa. The compaction behaviour of the powder during the compaction process was evaluated using the plastic work and the maximum ejection stress values. The tablet strength was determined using the tensile strength method and tablet disintegration study was also conducted. The results showed that the increase in the compaction pressures increased the plastic work, maximum ejection pressure, tablet strength and also its disintegration time. The tablet formed having 95% w/w mannitol composition exhibited the highest plastic work value of 10.32±0.01 J, highest maximum ejection pressure value of 4.4±0.06 MPa, highest tensile strength value of 1.06±0.04 MPa and shortest disintegration time of 171±51 s amongst the three different mannitol compositions studied. Meanwhile, the effects of mannitol composition in the tablet on these observed responses were also dependent upon the compaction pressures used during tablet formation. In conclusion, the addition of mannitol improved the tablet strength and shorten the disintegration time in the experimental range employed in this study.
Highlights
Cocoa is one of the major crops in Malaysia
When the compaction pressure was applied in the loading stage of the compaction process, the powder bed would be subjected to a decrease in volume as the particles started rearranging into a closer packing and became fragmented or deformed either plastically or elastically or combination of these main deformation behaviours
The plastic and elastic components of the deformation of the particles during the loading stage could be viewed from the force-displacement data obtained during the loading and unloading stages of the compaction process, where the permanent bed deformation was taken as approximating to the plastic deformation component of the particles whilst the recoverable particle bed height upon the removal of the compaction pressure represented the elastic component of the deformation during the loading stage of the compaction process
Summary
Cocoa is one of the major crops in Malaysia. The planted area for cocoa in Malaysia was approximately 15008 ha whereby about 810 Mt of cocoa was produced in 2018 (Department of Agriculture Malaysia, 2018). Cocoa powder is currently utilized in the food industry such as in the production of chocolates, beverages and other chocolate confectionaries (Beg et al, 2017). Tablets are compacted powders which are convenient to be handled and consumed by the public This was in line with the trend of increasing research of tableted food powders. For the case of cocoa powders, Mohamad and co-workers (2013) conducted a detailed fundamental study on the compaction behaviour of binary cocoa-lactose powder mixtures, on their ejection behaviours. These cocoa-lactose tablets could potentially be further extended to be formulated into a commercial product, the use of lactose as a sweetener would be unacceptable to lactose intolerance consumers
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