Special Issue "Mathematical Modeling of Drying Kinetics in Food and Biomass Processing"

A special issue of Processes (ISSN 2227-9717). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Process Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 January 2024 | Viewed by 1948

Special Issue Editors

School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Interests: molecular dynamics of food components; high electric field processing of thermo-sensitive food products; development of new food products and processes
Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL 61801, USA
Interests: agricultural operations (harvesting, drying, storage, transportation etc.); postharvest processing technologies (microwave, radiofrequency, pulse electric field, high electric field); natural fiber and bio composites from forest biomass; biomass pre-treatment and conversion
Department of Food Process Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Sundargarh 769008, Odisha, India
Interests: food engineering; storage and packaging; bioprocessing; byproduct valorization; data science and ML in food process engineering
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Fruits and vegetables are preserved by drying using a simultaneous heat, mass, and momentum transfer process that extends the food product’s shelf life. Drying is a crucial step in the conversion of biomass; for instance, pre-drying is necessary when using biomass to generate electricity in order to improve the combustion efficiency. Mathematical models should be used to simulate and validate the drying process. It is possible to obtain results through the use of virtual laboratories that would be difficult or impractical to attain at the conceptual stage of research. The use of mathematical equations to anticipate the behavior of the drying process is known as mathematical modeling of food and biomass processing.

This Special Issue titled “Mathematical Modeling of Drying Kinetics in Food and Biomass Processing” invites high-quality research articles on the mathematical modeling of various drying methods, such as oven drying, solar drying, infrared drying, radiofrequency drying, microwave drying, ohmic heating, high-electric-field drying or similar drying systems for a variety of food and biomass.

Dr. Ashutosh Singh
Dr. Gopu Raveendran Nair
Dr. Winny Routray
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • mathematical modeling of food and biomass processing
  • drying process
  • various drying methods
  • drying systems for a variety of food and biomass

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 3552 KiB  
Article
Drying Kinetics, Physicochemical and Thermal Analysis of Onion Puree Dried Using a Refractance Window Dryer
Processes 2023, 11(3), 700; https://doi.org/10.3390/pr11030700 - 26 Feb 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1404
Abstract
Onions have a high moisture content, which makes them more susceptible to microbial growth. Drying is one of the postharvest preservation methods applied to decrease onion moisture content, thereby increasing its storage life. In this study, onions were peeled, washed, cut into quarters, [...] Read more.
Onions have a high moisture content, which makes them more susceptible to microbial growth. Drying is one of the postharvest preservation methods applied to decrease onion moisture content, thereby increasing its storage life. In this study, onions were peeled, washed, cut into quarters, hot water blanched, and pureed. The puree was further dried using two different drying methods: refractance window drying (RWD) (water temperature: 70 °C) and convective drying (CD) (50 °C). The puree was spread on prefabricated trays at varying thicknesses of 2 mm, 4 mm, and 6 mm. It was observed that, irrespective of the drying method, moisture ratio (MR) decreased and drying time and effective moisture diffusivity increased with respect to the thickness of the puree. In addition, the Lewis model and the Wang and Singh model showed the highest R2 and lowest SEE value for RWD and CD, respectively. Moreover, the MR of onion puree during RWD and CD was predicted using a multi-layer feed-forward (MLF) artificial neural network (ANN) with a back-propagation algorithm. The result showed that the ANN model with 12 and 18 neurons in the hidden layer could predict the MR, with a high R2 value for RWD and CD, respectively. The results also showed that the thickness of the puree and drying method significantly affected the physicochemical quality (color characteristics, pyruvic acid content, total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, antioxidant capacity, and hygroscopicity) of onion powder. It was concluded that RWD proved to be a better drying method than CD in terms of the quality of dried powder and reduced drying time. Irrespective of the drying method, 2 mm-thick puree dried yielded the best-dried onion powder in terms of physicochemical quality, as well yielding the lowest drying time. These samples were further analyzed for calculating the glass transition temperature. Full article
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