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August 11, 2020

The future of rice processing

by Rajat Ramesh, Product Manager, Bühler India

Rice has long been the staple food for more than 50 percent of the world’s population, and the importance of rice in the global food market is undisputed. At the same time, the industry is going through paradigm shifts, especially in terms of technological innovations to improve the quality of rice.

 

Paddy to rice milling process
The processing of paddy to rice can be understood in terms of processing sections. Principally, there are seven sections in a typical rice mill – cleaning, hulling, whitening, polishing, sorting, grading and packing. During this process, the paddy gets converted to white rice in different stages. Like any other manufacturing process, processors need to get the business economics right. This means ensuring the highest level of output while minimising wastage and downtime, so process optimisation is absolutely critical.

Importance of whitening in rice processing

The bigger challenge facing the rice processing industry is how to meet the ever-rising quality standards, and consistency in the product output quality is what customers want. Also known as the heart of the rice mill, the rice whitener almost dictates the quality of the end product and its consistency, and rice processing equipment manufacturers like Bühler are central to this process. Being a pioneer of the rice industry for nearly half a century, Bühler fully understands these rising customer demands and has been instrumental in the evolution of the art of rice whitening.

Whitening of rice occurs when bran is removed from brown rice to convert into white rice through the abrasive effects of rice kernels rubbing against grinding stones in the rice whitener. The presence of brake bars reduces the speed of the whitening chamber, thus increasing the whitening time and improving whitening efficiency. Historically, the industry has adopted a horizontal design for whiteners but unfortunately this design had shortcomings in terms of lower efficiency. Bühler changed this trend by adopting a vertical, split-stone arrangement. This design meant less broken rice as well as ease of maintenance, and resulted in a machine that was reliable, operator friendly and that minimised downtimes. The second step change was the introduction of the patented shaft-less milling chamber design. This allowed air to pass freely around rice kernels resulting in cooler and cleaner kernels, free from the bran. A further upgrade to this design was the introduction of diamond grinding stones that helped increase the lifetime of the stones by almost five times.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


For additional daily news from milling around the world: global-milling.com

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