Reverse Methodology to Identify Moisture Diffusivity During Air-Drying of Foodstuffs

Abstract

The effective moisture diffusion is a key parameter for the simulation of the drying process of food products. A conventional procedure includes an identification step performed on thin-layer drying kinetics followed by a validation step on deep-bed drying kinetics. Unfortunately, this approach requires several experiments at different air temperatures while only using moisture data is accounted for identification purposes. For this reason, a reverse approach was developed. Results showed that identification on a single deep-bed kinetic allows for valid simulations of thin-layer kinetics on a wide range of temperatures. In addition, two correlations for moisture diffusivity are tested.

Keywords:

• Food drying
• Identification
• Moisture diffusivity
• Physical properties

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank several Master's and Ph.D. students (Perrine Leclercq, Analia Aparecida Vanzo, Abir Hosni, Azziz Zemmouri, Monica Pinto, and Benoit Hareng) and our colleagues Giana Almeida and Julien Cartailler for their valuable help in acquiring experimental data supporting the modeling and simulation work.