A novel approach to model nance drying considering its shrinkage

Abstract

Air drying is a viable preservation method to boost the accessibility of nance, a seasonal drupe with very short shelf life; however, information about nance drying is scarce, especially from a mass transfer (MT) standpoint. Besides, the lack of simple models considering the stone fraction (radius of inner stone/radius of nance) and the mesocarp shrinkage in drupes has caused most investigations rely on sphere and cube geometries, contributing to the unreliable estimation of MT properties. This study developed a discrete state-space (SS) formulation with analytical solution to describe nance drying which, unlike a variable separation (VS) solution, can consider a variable stone fraction, caused by outer boundary moving while flesh-pit interface remains still. Nance fruits were air dried (60, 70 and 80 °C) to obtain their moisture kinetics and shrinking behavior. Drying data were used to estimate water diffusivity (D) under rigid (VS and SS solutions) and shrinkable (SS and numerical solution) mesocarp assumptions. Nances lost about 60% of their initial volume at the end of drying, while stone fraction increased from 0.44 to 0.62. D values ranged from 5.3 to 6.7 (×10–10) m2/s with SS approach and variable stone fraction. The major source of error in D was not the formulation (SS or VS) when a rigid mesocarp was considered, but the values assigned to the nance radius (length for diffusion) and stone fraction, an initial or average value along process. SS diffusivities did not differ to those estimated with the full numerical solution under variable stone fraction (p>0.05), while VS parameters were overestimated by 44–46 % as a minimum. SS formulation can be applied to hollow cylinders and other geometries with 2D or 3D MT, while able to include non-isotropic shrinkage and evolving external conditions, a problem normally reserved to pure numerical implementations, offering substantial advantages over VS equations.