Kinetics of Drying Medicinal Plants by Hybridization of Solar Technologies

Abstract

Historically, medicinal plants have always had an important place in medicine. Medicinal plants processing represents a great challenge, due to their compounds sensitive to the environmental conditions that surround and degrade them. Mostly of these plants require to be dry to preserve its safety and medicinal properties; therefore, for proper drying, it is necessary to use sustainable devices that protect the desirable characteristics of plants from direct radiation. In this work, the kinetics of dehydration of three medicinal plants are presented in an indirect solar dryer. In addition, the experimental results were adjusted to nine mostly used models, to estimate the drying conditions required to achieve a desired final moisture content. Modified Page and Page were the models with better fit to experimental results. Furthermore, a computational simulation of temperature evolution and distribution inside the dryer is presented. These results agree with those obtained experimentally.

Drying kinetics, thermodynamic properties and physicochemical characteristics of Rue leaves

“…The experimental values of RX were used to fit twelve mathematical models (Eqs. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] commonly used to represent the drying kinetics of various agricultural products, considering each drying condition of Rue leaves 2,19,36 .…”

“…However, it is important to control the process so that quality is not compromised 2 , 13 , in addition to ensuring its greater efficiency. Téllez et al 14 argue that the drying process should be sufficiently fast, without compromising the quality of medicinal plants. Drying is affected by several factors, including drying air temperature, air velocity, and drying system, which can result in loss of bioactive compounds and color change 15 .…”