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This study focuses on the convective drying of apple rings by air at ambient temperature. The lumped reaction engineering approach (REA) model has been employed to determine the rate of drying for apple rings under forced convection considered as a normal processing regime. The algorithm implies origination of the activation energy curve from accurate ‘reference’ measurements of the drying rate under natural convection conditions. Mass transfer coefficients for the apple ring samples required for the model implementation were obtained in a series of experiments under natural and forced conditions. These were compared to the values of mass transfer coefficients obtained from numerical simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics® software. The study extends the application of REA for the limiting simplest case of convective drying of thick samples under ambient temperature conditions.