Abstract
The present work has the objective to study the water diffusion in the process of intermittent solar drying of mangabas. Osmotic dehydration (OD) pretreatment was performed in sucrose solution and the drying took place in a direct solar dryer with the fruits arranged in stainless steel screens, temperatures varying between 30 and 45°C along the day with peaks of 70°C. The period of intermittence was approximately 16 h reaching equilibrium after 6 days. The diffusional model based on the second Fick’s law was proposed for each of the daily drying periods of 360 minutes, considered that the process is controlled by internal diffusion, negligible external resistance, spherical geometry, shrinkage based on the average radius. The coefficients of effective diffusion (Def) obtained by using 4 terms of the infinite series, present values of Def ranging from 0.2 to 3.30x10-10 m2/s with R2≥ 0.868 and average relative deviations MRD≤10-2.
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