Influence of Drying Methods on Jackfruit Drying Behavior and Dried Products Physical Characteristics

Area of Science:

• Food Science and Technology
• Materials Science
• Chemical Engineering

Background:

• Jackfruit powder production involves various drying techniques.
• Understanding the impact of drying methods on powder characteristics is crucial for quality control and application.
• Microstructural analysis provides insights into physical property variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of solar, oven, and refractance window drying on jackfruit powder properties.
• To model the drying behavior of jackfruit slices using thin layer drying models.
• To analyze the microstructure and physical properties of the resulting jackfruit powders.

Main Methods:

• Drying jackfruit slices using solar, oven, and refractance window drying (RWD) methods.
• Fitting fifteen thin layer drying models to experimental data using nonlinear regression.
• Analyzing powder solubility, rehydration ratio, porosity, fractal dimension (FD), and lacunarity.

Main Results:

• Modified Henderson and Pabis, Verma et al., and Hii et al. models best described RWD, oven, and solar drying, respectively.
• Effective moisture diffusivity varied across drying methods (RWD: 5.11 × 10⁻⁹, Oven: 3.28 × 10⁻¹⁰, Solar: 2.55 × 10⁻¹⁰).
• Refractance window and solar-dried powders exhibited higher solubility and better microstructural properties (lower FD) than oven-dried powders.

Conclusions:

• Drying method significantly affects jackfruit powder's drying kinetics, effective moisture diffusivity, and physical properties.
• Refractance window drying and solar drying are superior to oven drying for preserving jackfruit powder quality.
• Microstructural analysis using fractal dimension is a valuable tool for characterizing dried food powders.