Cereal Chem. 70:720-723   |  VIEW ARTICLE

Prediction of Wet-Milling Starch Yield from Corn by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

R. L. Wehling, D. S. Jackson, D. G. Hooper, and A. R. Ghaedian. Copyright 1993 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

Near-infrared reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy was used to predict the wet-milling starch yield obtainable from yellow dent corn. Spectral differences between samples with high and low starch yields were observed in two wavelength regions, 2,265-2,325 and 1,050-1,125 nm. The higher-wavelength region corresponds to known carbohydrate absorption bands; however, the origin of the shorter-wavelength differences is less clear. Different combinations of sample handling and spectral treatments were also evaluated, and the most successful instrument calibration used a multiterm linear equation of second-derivative reflectance terms obtained from whole-kernel corn. Multiple correlation coefficients for the various calibrations ranged from 0.8 to 0.9, with reproducibility of the laboratory wet-milling procedure being a limiting factor. Application of the optimized calibration to a validation set containing samples from two crop years gave a bias- corrected standard error of prediction equal to 1.41%, a result equal to or better than the standard error of the reference method.