Development of a device for staged determination of water activity and moisture content

Moisture content and water activity are important parameters for quality characterizationof products like bulk materials, powders, granules. Thus, an exact determination is necessarilyrequired in a wide range of industrial applications. Moisture of materials is the content ofnon-chemically bound water in a solid or liquid. Water activity (aw) is a characteristic/parameter ofthe non-chemically bound (“free”) water in materials and is measured as humidity over asolid/liquid surface at constant temperature (equilibrium moisture content). It is an importantparameter to characterize the quality of e.g., pharmaceutical and food products. In ourcontribution, we present the developed MOISHUM device for staged determination of wateractivity and moisture content of liquid and solid materials.