Drying Kinetics Comparison of Methylcellulose Gel Versus Mango Fruit in Forced Convective Drying With and Without Electrohydrodynamic Enhancement

Abstract

International audienceElectrohydrodynamic convective drying (EHD drying) is a novel drying method used to enhance forced convection drying (FC drying) by using a wire-electrode to create an electrostatic field. In a previous study, the efficiency of EHD drying (using three different wire-electrode configurations) was compared to classical FC drying by measuring the drying rate of methylcellulose gel. Efficiency was quantified in terms of exergy (transient exergetic efficiency) through the use of a proposed model. In that previous study, it was stated that methylcellulose gel can be used to simulate a food product and can be controlled to a predetermined moisture content. The purpose of this current work was to compare how methylcellulose gel compares to a real food product (mango fruit) in terms of drying kinetics for both EHD and FC drying. Drying kinetics were quantified in terms of a per unit area measurement of the exergetic efficiency, exergy supplied and used, drying rate, and total drying time to reach a moisture content of 50%. Initial results show that for both EHD and FC drying, methylcellulose gel and mango fruit exhibit similar drying kinetics

Electrohydrodynamic drying of food: New insights from conjugate modeling

“…These advantages make EHD a promising alternative drying technology. It has been used to dry food products, amongst others apple (Martynenko and Zheng, 2016), mushrooms Havet, 2015a, 2015b), banana (Pirnazari et al, 2016), mango (Bardy et al, 2016), carrot (Ding et al, 2015) or wheat (Singh et al, 2015). Working prototypes of EHD dryers have been built (Lai, 2010), but no commercial EHD dryers are available yet, although the technology has been known for several decades.…”

Exergy Analyses of Onion Drying by Convection: Influence of Dryer Parameters on Performance

“…Bardy et al [ 3 , 4 ] applied the thermodynamic analysis proposed by [ 5 ] to the drying of methylcellulose gel and mango fruit in forced convection drying with and without electrohydrodynamic enhancement.…”

Future perspectives for electrohydrodynamic drying of biomaterials

“…Electrohydrodynamic drying is a non-thermal technology, by which it is particularly suitable to dehydrate heat-sensitive biomaterials [60]. EHD drying is predominantly used to dry food products, including apple [44], mushrooms [55,56,57,58], banana [25,49], mango [9], okara cake [40], tomato [24], sea cucumber [6], carrot [21] or wheat [52]. Other biomaterials have also been dried, such as methylcellulose gel, which serves as a food substitute [8], or agar gel [2,33].…”