DETERMINATION OF SHELL CONTENT IN PALM KERNEL CAKE

A method for determining shell in palm kernel cake (PKC) is described. This simple and rapid method requires little pretreatment compared wi th the method currently used in PKC trade, in which the sample undergo es defatting, acid and alkali digestion, and washing, before a chlorof orm-alcohol solution is used to separate the shells. In the proposed m ethod, only defatting the sample is required, The shells are separated by the density difference between the shell and PKC in a potassium io dide solution. Recoveries of at least 93% were obtained, and the corre lation coefficient between the actual shell content and the determined shell content was 0.999, with gradients of 0.97 and 0.98 for fine and coarse shell, respectively.