The 8th Asia-Pacific Drying Conference (ADC2015) was held at Cititel Midvalley from August 10–12, 2015, at Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. The conference was attended by 123 registered participants from 15 countries and mostly from the institutions of higher learning followed by research agencies and industries. In total, 105 abstracts were submitted to the conference and 85 full papers were sent by the participants. The full papers were published in conference proceedings.
The theme of ADC 2015 was “Sustainable Drying Technologies for the New Era,” which covered challenges and developments in various aspects of drying, dehydration, and dewatering technologies. The technical program consisted of two plenary speeches and six keynote speeches, with around 85 technical papers presented in 10 parallel oral sessions and two poster sessions. Specifically, the articles presented fall under the following categories: (i) innovative drying and dehydration techniques, (ii) fundamentals and theories of drying, (iii) drying of food and agricultural products, and (iv) mathematical modeling and simulations.
Papers for this special issue of Drying Technology (DRT) were selected upon evaluation by the technical editorial team from the organizing team of ADC2015 and recommended to the editor-in-chief of the journal. The authors were then invited to re-submit the manuscript to DRT with updated information and were further subjected to two rounds of reviews by experts in the respective fields. As a result, 10 papers were finally accepted and published in this Special Issue. The published papers report the latest developments and innovations in the areas of mathematical modeling and simulations (two papers), advanced drying techniques (two papers), product quality and analyses (four papers), and process optimization (two papers).
The Guest Editors and organizing committee of ADC 2015 would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Arun S. Mujumdar for his continuous support of the ADC conference series, and also special thanks to Prof. Chung Lim Law for his valuable efforts in processing this special issue. Last but not least, appreciation is extended to the reviewers, authors, and editorial staffs (DRT), and also to the many who worked behind the scenes for their efforts in promoting and disseminating high quality research work through this Special Issue.
We believe that this issue will find favourable response from the readers.