Modeling and Evaluation of Thermal Diffusivity and Activation Energy of Potato slices in Forced Convection Multi Tray Solar Dryer

Srivastava A.K^1, , Shukla S.K² and Singh U.K³

¹Faculty, Mechanical Engineering Department, SRMGPC, Lucknow U.P, India

²Centre For Energy Resource and Development (CERD), Mechanical Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology

³(Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi, India

Cite this paper:
Srivastava A.K, Shukla S.K and Singh U.K. Modeling and Evaluation of Thermal Diffusivity and Activation Energy of Potato slices in Forced Convection Multi Tray Solar Dryer. American Journal of Food Science and Technology. 2015; 3(2):27-32. doi: 10.12691/ajfst-3-2-1

Abstract

In the work being presented, the modeling and analysis of thermal diffusivity and activation energy of high moisture potato slices in multi tray solar dryer has been investigated. Thin layer drying experiments were conducted on potato slices kept in multi tray cabinet dryer with PCM (Lauric acid) as energy storage system on 14/3/2014 and 24/3/2014 under Indian climatic conditions. The experimental setup consists of a flat plate solar collector with a blower and a drying cabinet with PCM kept in a chamber. The study was performed in the drying temperature ranging from 300.2K to 332K and at 0.4 m/Sec air velocity. Seven common thin layer drying models were fitted to the experimental data and several statistical tools (R², RMSE and SSE) were used to adjudge the most appropriate model. Logarithmic model for effective moisture diffusivity and quadratic power model for activation energy were found as the most appropriate models for their computation. Effective diffusivity was found to vary from 1.17exp (-7) to 10.0889exp(-7)m²/sec and activation energy was found to vary from 0.0525KJ/mole to 4.524742 KJ/mole. These findings are being presented in this paper.

Keywords:
moisture diffusivity. activation energy. moisture ratio drying time

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