“…In recent years, a number of advanced drying techniques have been developed for the drying of plant materials for various downstream applications. Current drying methods can be divided into three groups including (1) convectional drying, for example hot-air/oven drying, [4][5][6][7][8][9] conventional/low temperature-air drying, [9] vacuum/vacuum oven drying, [8][9][10][11][12] sun drying, [9,10,13] under shade drying, [10,14] heat pumpdehumidified air drying, [5] low-pressure superheated steam drying, [4] freeze drying; [5,8,10] (2) radiation drying such as microwave drying, [5,9,13,15] infrared drying; [6,7,9] and (3) combined drying or novel drying such as microwave-assisted hot-air drying, [6] infraredcombined hot air drying, [4,7] hot air-assisted radio frequency drying, [6] vacuummicrowave drying, [11,16] combined infrared-vacuum drying, [17] and combined lowpressure superheated steam drying and far-infrared radiation. [18] Xu [19,20] reported that vacuum freeze drying followed by hot air drying (FAD) consumed less energy than hot air drying followed by vacuum freeze drying (AFD), and was comparable to convective hot air drying (AD) and vacuum freeze drying (FD).…”