TITLE:
Kinetic Models for Drying Techniques—Food Materials
AUTHORS:
Uwem Ekwere Inyang, Innocent Oseribho Oboh, Benjamin Reuben Etuk
KEYWORDS:
Drying Kinetics, Thin Layer, Mathematical Modeling, Rate Constant, Diffusion, Statistical Measures
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Chemical Engineering and Science,
Vol.8 No.2,
March
9,
2018
ABSTRACT: Drying operations can help in reducing the moisture content of food materials
for avoidance of microbial growth and deterioration, for shelf life elongation,
to minimize packaging and improving storage for easy transportation.
Thin-layer drying of materials is necessary to understand the fundamental
transport mechanism and a prerequisite to successfully simulate or scale up
the whole process for optimization or control of the operating conditions. Researchers
have shown that to rely solely on experimental drying practices
without mathematical considerations for the drying kinetics, can significantly
affect the efficiency of dryers, increase the cost of production, and reduce the
quality of the dried product. An effective model is necessary for the process
design, optimization, energy integration and control; hence, the use of mathematical
models in finding the drying kinetics of agricultural products is
very important. The statistical criteria in use for the evaluation of the best
model(s) has it that coefficient of determination (R2) has to be close to unity
while the rest statistical measures will have values tending to zero. In this
work, the essence of drying using thin-layer, general approaches to modeling
for food drying mechanisms thin layer drying models and optimization of the
drying processes have been discussed.