EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF FAR-INFRARED VACUUM DRYING OF APPLE SLICES

In this paper the experimental results of far‐infrared vacuum drying of apple slices were presented. The investigation of far‐infrared vacuum drying processes was conducted on the experimental set‐up that was designed to imitate industrial batch dryer. Apple slices were dried at various vacuum pressures and temperatures of heaters which were kept constant during the single experiments. Five well known thin layer drying models from scientific literature were used to approximate the experimental data of drying kinetics in terms of moisture ratio. For each model and data set, the statistical performance index and chi‐squared value were calculated and models were ranked afterwards. The performed statistical analysis shows that the model of Aghbashlo gives the best results for approximation of experimental drying data of apple slices.