Medium and short-wave infrared drying: Principles, applications, and future trends

Abstract

Medium and short-wave infrared drying (MSWID) is a new drying technology, widely used for drying agricultural products, such as fruits, vegetables, and edible fungi. MSWID is superior to conventional drying technologies due to its high energy efficiency, uniform heating, and high product quality. This method can be combined with other drying techniques to improve the penetration degree, drying rate, and product quality, including vacuum freeze-drying, differential pressure flash, air impingement, and microwave vacuum drying. This review comprehensively investigates and discusses the principles, characteristics, and applications of MSWID with/without other techniques for agricultural products. The effects of three parameters (drying temperature, radiation power, and distance) on the drying kinetics and product quality are discussed in detail. The combination of MSWID with other drying methods is also summarized, providing new insights into MSWID applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Medium and short-wave infrared drying (MSWID)
• conventional drying techniques
• combined drying techniques
• agricultural product quality
• drying kinetics
• drying mechanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author Contributions

Aiqing Li: Methodology and writing-original draft preparation. Siyi Qiao: Drawing and writing. Maoxiang Xia: Drawing and writing. Yawen Lin: Conceptualization, supervision, writing-reviewing and funding acquisition. Lei Wang: Writing-reviewing and editing. Yongkang Xie: Writing-reviewing, editing and funding acquisition. Jianrong Li: Conceptualization, supervision and writing-reviewing. Xuepeng Li: Conceptualization, supervision and writing-reviewing.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32202102), the Doctoral Research Fund of Liaoning Province (2022-BS-303), the Open Fund of Institute of Ocean Research, Bohai University (BDHYYJY2021001), Jinzhou scientific plan program (JZ2022B030), the Key Research and Development and Promotion Projects of Henan Province (212102110232) and the Science and Technology Fund Project for Excellent Young of Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (2022YQ23).