Lynne Wong's PhD thesis

wetting process, in which they were soaked in a bucket of tap water for about twenty
minutes, the surface water was then allowed to run off before placing the leaves between
sheets of absorbent paper for drying. Shredded original dry leaves, wetted dry leaves and
green leaves were then added to chipped cane stalk as in trial I, and analyses carried out.
The moisture content of all types of trash samples was also determined by oven-drying 100
g of the sample at 105 °C to constant mass (about 3 hours) and weighing immediately after
removal from the oven as per the standard practice, since the leaves absorb atmospheric
moisture quickly on cooling.
The whole experiment was repeated four times, as in Trial I.
In Trial III, the moisture content in dry leaves was varied even further. Six kg dry leaves
were collected, 2 kg were used as is after being shredded, 2 kg were wetted and 2 kg were
oven dried at 105 °C for 3 hours to drive off most of the moisture, before being shredded
and used.
In Trial IV, an air-dried bagasse sample was substituted for the dry leaf sample, part of
which was wetted and oven dried as the dry leaves in Trial III. Only one set of tests was
carried out to check the Brix-free water effect of bagasse.
2.2.1.2 Determination of Brix-free water in dry leaf
An analytical method similar to that used by Mangion and Player (1991) to determine the
Brix-free water in various parts of cane was adopted. Ten dry leaves each, of the four
main cane varieties cultivated in Mauritius (M 695/69, M 1658/78, M 3035/66 and R 570)
were collected, cut into strips 1 cm wide, washed repeatedly in running cold water until the
solution gave no Brix reading. The four samples were then separately disintegrated in 1 L
of water in a wet disintegrator at 8000 rpm for 10 minutes, sieved and air-dried.
About 8 g each of the four samples were placed in pre-weighed 250 mL glass bottles and
dried in a vacuum oven at 80 °C overnight. After drying, the bottles were stoppered and
cooled in a desiccator before weighing to determine the mass of the samples. A 10° Brix
sucrose solution was prepared and mercuric iodide juice preservative solution added at the
rate of 0.5 mL/L. To each trash sample were then added 150 mL of the 10° Brix sucrose
solution, the mass of which was accurately determined. The contact time between the trash
sample and the sucrose solution was one-and-a-half hours, during which period the bottles
were shaken from time to time. The solutions were then filtered through a Whatman 91
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