Modelling the Drying Kinetics of Monkey Cola (Cola Parchycarpa)

Abstract

The need for storage is one of the crucial factors considered in food preservation, due to deterioration and spoilage of food materials. Drying as a means of preservation has been adopted in processing of food materials by exposing the material to heat to heat for the reduction of moisture content to the level unfavorable for mold growth. Monkey cola is a nutritional indigenous seed known with its pleasant taste and medicinal values. Moisture kinetics and drying time were used to examine the drying characteristics of Monkey cola seed. Monkey kola seed and a suitable mathematical model was developed by fitting the drying data gotten from the open sun drying and oven drying of monkey kola at different temperatures (40, 50, 65, 60 and 70 0 C) to properly predict the drying characteristics of the seed using statistical tools. This gives the highest R ₂ and lowest RMSE and provided the longterm performance of correlation for each degree of temperature. The best model fitted for each temperature at 40, 50, 65, 60 and 70 0 C for oven drying were Diffusion approach, Verma, Hii, and Midili Kucuk models, respectively, and Midili Kucuk model, for open sun drying. Temperature dependence of the effective diffusivity (Deff) coefficient was expressed by an Arrhenius type relationship and the activation energy (Ea) was determined.

Mathematical Modelling of Drying Characteristics of Lemon Grass Leaves (Cymbopogon citratus)

“…The selected models were validated by plotting graphs of the predicted moisture ratio against the experimental moisture ratio of the sample at the different drying temperatures. Validation is necessary to scrutinize the fitness of the models in predicting the drying kinetics of the lemon grass leaves and to obtain a valid model, the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) generated from the graph should be ≥ 0.75 (Olabinjo and Adeniyan, 2020). From the figure 4.…”