Ricerc@Sapienza

We exploit prediction capabilities of the moving-boundary model for food isothermal drying proposed in Adrover et al. (2019). We apply the model to two different sets of literature experimental data resulting from the air-drying process of eggplant cylinders (two-dimensional problem) and potatoes slices (three-dimensional problem). These two food materials, both exhibiting non-ideal shrinkage, are characterized by very different “calibration curves“ i.e. different behaviours of volume reduction V/V0as a function of the rescaled moisture content X/X0.

A moving-boundary model is proposed for describing food isothermal drying. The model takes into account
volume reduction of food materials and it is capable to predict sample shrinkage and surface deformation during
the drying process. It can be applied to any sample geometry (discoid, cylindrical, cubic, parallelepiped) and to
any food material since it can take into account that sample volume can decrease of a quantity that can be
smaller, equal or larger than the corresponding volume of removed water.