Abstract

The current work presents an investigation on fruit drying system. The effect of the operating parameters on the quality of products and the efficiency of the system is studied. The method is based on a new model which was developed to study the fruit drying system performance considering equilibrium moisture content of fruit, humidity of dryer atmosphere, temperature of dryer atmosphere and air flow. The results revealed that operating parameters are highly controlling the dryer efficiency, whereas increase in the air temperature highly reduced the energy required and enhance the dryer efficiency. However, high temperature could damage the fruit, that is worsens the quality. Therefore, the air temperature plays the main role in controlling the quality of the dried fruit.

Key words: Fruit drying process, operating parameters, quality, modeling.