Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
15th International Congress on Agricultural Mechanization and Energy in Agriculture – ANKAgEng’2023, Antalya, Türkiye, 29 Ekim - 01 Kasım 2023, cilt.1, ss.43
Drying is a common technology that provides a long post-harvest storage period for products such as cantaloupe. This work aimed to investigate the drying behavior of cantaloupe during combined convectivemicrowave drying system. Three drying air temperatures (40, 55 and 70 °C), microwave powers (180, 360 and 540 W) and air velocities (0.5, 1 and 1.5 m/s) were investigated on drying time, specific energy consumption, shrinkage, rehydration ratio, changes in total color, phenol and antioxidant content of cantaloupe during drying. Nine mathematical models were selected to fit the experimental data for drying kinetics, and the results revealed that the Midilli model exhibited, in all cases, the best performance in fitting the experimental data (R2 varying from 0.99959 to 0.99997; χ2 from 0.00002 to 0.00203 and RMSE from 0.01857 to 0.54241). Calculated values of moisture diffusivity for dried cantaloupe varied from a minimum of 2.42× 10-11 to a maximum of 9.79× 10-9 m2/s under the tested drying conditions. Drying time and specific energy consumption values decreased as air temperature, microwave power and air velocity was increased. Shrinkage, rehydration ratio, changes in total color values were calculated and found to vary in the range from 27.85 to 50.07%, 3.44 to 5.57 and 27.11 to 35.74, respectively. The range of antioxidant activity and total phenolic content of the dried cantaloupe was 42.57–79.11% and 18.15–34.36 mg GA/100g dw, respectively.