Results and Discussion
Moisture content
Results of the moisture content of fresh shrimp shell, chitin and chitosan samples are presented in Table 1, 2, and 3. Ushakumari and Ramanujan (2012) investigated that moisture of shrimp shell waste is 71.6% which is closely related to the value (69.3%) obtained in this study. The lowering of moisture content in the present study due to the lack of homogeneity of the sample. Moisture content of chitin lies from 8.50% to 9.23% which is lower than the value (12.90% for mussel shell) reported by Abdulkarim et al. (2013). This may be due to the source of chitin and drying conditions. According to Li (1992), commercial chitosan products contain less than 10% moisture. The shrimp shell chitosan samples had a moisture content ranging from 7.69% to 8.25%. Chitosan is hygroscopic in nature (Khan etal., 2002) hence it can be affected by moisture absorption during storage.