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Ripening is one of the most important processes to occur in fruits and involves changes in colour, flavour and texture. An important goal in quality control of fruits is to substitute traditional sensory testing methods with reliable and quantitative methods. In this study, methyl jasmonate (MJ) (220 lL L )1 ) and calcium chloride (at 1%) were applied to guava fruits stored at 6°C. The compression test (CT) and acoustic impact test were used to monitor the shelf life of guavas. The results obtained using both techniques showed that Young's modulus diminishes as a function of time in all samples; however, the texture of samples treated for 20 days with MJ deteriorated unacceptably, a condition which did not occur in the samples treated with calcium chloride. The control samples had a shelf life of 20 days. In conclusion, it appears that the acoustic impact test is more appropriate than the CT and has the additional advantage of being a nondestructive technique.

Currently, several solar dehydrator designs exist on the market, and some of these designs require expensive materials, which makes the prototype expensive and difficult to obtain for small producers. The aim of this study was to build a low‐cost solar dryer with high energy efficiency based on a previous solar dryer model. The optimization of the previous solar dryer model was characterized via temperature profiles and drying kinetics to identify gaps. Theoretical and numerical modeling was used to correct the gaps, and a new prototype was then built. The inclination angle was changed from 45° in the previous model to 20° in the new model. As compared with the old model, the results indicated that the new model improved the efficiency by 43.75% for banana fruit, thereby demonstrating the optimization of the new model. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS The solar dryer developed in this study will be applied to dehydrate fruits and vegetables with a capacity of up to 10 kg. It is a dryer built with low‐cost materials, simple operation and high energy efficiency. Preserved safe products are obtained with solar dryer.