Conditioning of Tobacco and Tobacco Products: The Effect of Forced Air Flow

Conditioning is a very important procedure for tobacco and tobacco products before their corresponding chemical and physical analysis. For cigarettes, forced air flow is generally required during the conditioning procedure. A special wind tunnel was designed to investigate how the forced air flow affects the conditioning of cigarettes in a constant climate laboratory. Two types of cigarettes with blended (including flue-cured and burley tobacco strands) and pure flue-cured tobacco strands were selected as test samples. It was found that the conditioning time to achieve the equilibrium could be shortened from 23 h without forced air flow to 7 h with a forced air flow rate of 2m/s. This is mainly due to the exchange of water molecules between cigarette samples and atmosphere being accelerated by applying the forced air flow. It was concluded that a 48 h conditioning period using the described forced air flow rate setup was unnecessary to attain the equilibrium for cigarettes. [Beitr. Tabakforsch. Int. 28 (2019) 224–229]