Drying Kinetics of Banana Slices (cvs. Musa nana and Musa Cavendish)

• Autor(es): Guiné, Raquel ; Barroca, Maria João
• Data: 2013
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.19/1765
• Origem: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico de Viseu
• Assunto(s): banana; drying kinetic
• Tipo de Documento: Documento de conferência
• Idioma: Inglês

Descrição

In the present work, bananas of cvs. Musa nana and Musa Cavendish were dehydrated by hot air drying at 50 ºC and 70 ºC. The purpose of this work was to fit the kinetic data to different thin layer models found in the literature to describe the drying rates of bananas, in order to find out which model better describes the drying kinetics of these two varieties of bananas. The selection of the appropriate drying model was based on their coefficients of determination, which were predicted by non-linear regression analysis using the Sigma Plot program. From the obtained results it was possible to conclude that the drying of both banana varieties had a similar kinetic behaviour, regardless of the operating conditions. As to the influence of the drying temperature on the process, it was observed that increasing the drying temperature from 50 ºC to 70 ºC leads to a diminishing of approximately 34 % and 49 % in the drying time to Musa cavendish and Musa nana, respectively. Furthermore, based on the standard deviation results, as well as on the additional statistical information, the two parameter models such as the Page and modified Page models as well as the Wang & Singh model were the best to describe the drying kinetics of these two kinds of banana varieties.