Determination of Desorption Isotherms of Potato Using Gravimetric Method and Fast Isotherm Method

Abstract

The desorption isotherms of potato (Solanum tuberosum) were determined for a range of temperature 30–60 °C using gravimetric and fast isotherm method over the range of relative humidity 5–85%. The objective of this work is to investigate and document the best practice to perform experiments using both these two methods. The desorption isotherms obtained from the gravimetric method were fitted using three models: GAB, BET, and Oswin. A nonlinear least-square regression analysis was used to evaluate the constants of the three isotherm models. The goodness of the fit was determined by two statistical parameters: standard error and correlation coefficient. GAB model was found to be competent to describe desorption isotherms of potato followed by BET and Oswin model. Also, the sorption behavior of potato obtained from the fast isotherm method was validated to the standard gravimetric method.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Punit Singh is a Ph.D. student at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, under the supervision of Prof. Prabal Talukdar. He received his M.S (by Research) degree from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in Thermal Engineering in 2014. He did his B. Tech. from Uttar Pradesh Technical University, Lucknow in 2010. Currently he is working in the area of food drying.

Prabal Talukdar is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. He received his M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He has worked with the Institute of Fluid Mechanics, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, as a postdoctoral fellow. His research areas are radiative heat transfer, heat and mass transfer in porous media, convective drying, heat transfer through thermal protective fabric. He has authored more than 125 international journal and conference papers.