Empirical Drying Model for the Mass Transfer and Drying Kinetics of Treated and Untreated Saba Banana Slices

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Banana fruit is a delight in most Nigerian homes, which is usually eaten fresh, but recently, dried bananas have found their way into the daily snacks. Unfortunately, this precious fruit suffers a huge post-harvest loss due to its high moisture content. This work includes the fitting of the drying process to empirical models to predict the drying process using a locally fabricated convective tray dryer. To prevent discolouring during drying, samples were treated with a 1:4 lemon juice. Drying was carried out (for both treated and untreated samples) at temperatures of 40 0C, 50 0C, 60 0C, and 70 0C. Four empirical models were examined (Newton, Peleg, Henderson-Pabis, and Logarithmic models), and the model with the highest R2 and least RMSE values was adopted as the best fit for each drying temperature. Results showed that the Peleg model favoured air-drying and at temperatures of 50 0C and 600C for untreated and treated samples, respectively, while other models considered, best described the drying at other temperatures, for both treated and untreated samples.