Drying Kinetics Parameters of Various Food Materials Employed in the Reaction Engineering Approach (REA) to Describe Global and Local Drying Rates

Abstract

An effective drying model should be accurate yet require a small number of experiments to generate the parameters. The relative activation energy of various food materials, important drying kinetic properties used in reaction engineering approach (REA), is evaluated and summarized. The REA is then implemented to model the global and local drying rates of food materials. By using the relative activation energy, the REA describes well (R2 higher than 0.99) global drying rate of food materials. The REA can be coupled with a set of equations of conservation of heat and mass transfer to model the local drying rate of food materials. The relative activation energy is indeed proven to be accurate to model the local drying rate. While the predictions are accurate, the REA is very effective to generate the drying parameters since the relative activation energy can be generated from one accurate drying run since different drying conditions of the same material with similar initial moisture content would result in the similar relative activation energies. The drying kinetics parameters generated here are readily used for design of new equipment, evaluate the performance of existing dryers and monitor the product quality.