Drying operations can help in reducing the moisture content of food materials for avoidance of microbial growth and deterioration, for shelf life elongation, to minimize packaging and improving storage for easy transportation. Thin-layer drying of materials is necessary to understand the fundamental transport mechanism and a prerequisite to successfully simulate or scale up the whole process for optimization or control of the operating conditions. Researchers have shown that to rely solely on experimental drying practices without mathematical considerations for the drying kinetics, can significantly affect the efficiency of dryers, increase the cost of production, and reduce the quality of the dried product. An effective model is necessary for the process design, optimization, energy integration and control; hence, the use of mathematical models in finding the drying kinetics of agricultural products is very important. The statistical criteria in use for the evaluation of the best model(s) has it that coefficient of determination (R 2 ) has to be close to unity while the rest statistical measures will have values tending to zero. In this work, the essence of drying using thin-layer, general approaches to modeling for food drying mechanisms thin layer drying models and optimization of the drying processes have been discussed.
The effect of process variables such as nozzle size, flow-rate of dispersed phase, inter-electrode distance, and presence of an acid acceptor and a thickening agent in the dispersed phase, on the production and size distribution of nylon 6-10 microcapsules prepared by interfacial polymerization in a high-voltage electric field was studied. Factors which increased the intensity of the electrostatic forces acting upon the droplets formed, such as increasing nozzle diameter at constant aqueous phase flow-rate and decreasing inter-electrode distance, were found to decrease the capsule size while those which enhanced the availability of the aqueous phase monomer for the polymerization reaction, such as the addition of an acid acceptor and a thickening agent, resulted in an increase in the average size of the capsules obtained. Free flowing capsules and a reduction in the rate of diacid chloride hydrolysis during the process were also obtained with increasing concentration of the thickening agent in the aqueous phase.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.