More and more saffron has been cultivated in China because of the increasing saffron demand, but no paper has studied the influence of drying methods on the quality of Chinese saffron. In this paper, three different dehydration treatments applied in actual production were evaluated: dehydration with electric oven, vacuum oven, and microwave. We determined that the highest quality of saffron wil...

Drying characteristics of rough rice (variety of lenjan) with an initial moisture content of 25% dry basis (db) was studied in a hot air dryer assisted by infrared heating. Three arrival air temperatures (30, 40 and 50C) and four infrared radiation intensities (0, 0.2 , 0.4 and 0.6 W/cm) and three arrival air speeds (0.1, 0.15 and 0.2 m.s) were studied. Bending strength of brown rice kernel, pe...

Microwave (MW) offers a unique heating mechanism, which volumetrically pushes internal moisture to the surface during drying of water-rich foods such as fish. However, due uneven power distribution, continuous application MW energy causes excessive localized heating, resulting in deterioration food quality. Incorporation other techniques convective, vacuum, osmotic, and freeze-drying with has b...

Two electronic moisture analyzers were critically evaluated with regard to their suitability for determining moisture in small amounts (< or = 200 mg) of various environmental matrices such as leaves, needles, soil, peat, sediments, and sewage sludge, as well as various biological reference materials. To this end, several homogeneous bulk materials were prepared which were subsequently employed...

The application of beneficial, plant-associated microorganisms is a sustainable approach to improving crop performance in agriculture. However, microbial inoculants are often susceptible to prolonged periods of storage and deleterious environmental factors, which negatively impact their viability and ultimately limit efficacy in the field. This particularly concerns non-sporulating bacteria. To...

This paper examines the influence of imposed drying, intended to represent horizontal advection of dry air, on parameterized deep convection interacting with large-scale dynamics in a single-column model framework. Two single-column models, one based on the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System general circulation model version 5 (GEOS5) and the other developed by Bony and Emanuel, are run in wea...

[1] This study uses a cloud-resolving model under the weak temperature gradient (WTG) approximation to explore the response of deep convection to imposed drying. The drying, intended to mimic horizontal advection of dry air, is imposed as a linear relaxation of the humidity field toward zero within a specified layer. Radiative cooling and sea surface temperature are held constant and there is n...

Luikov’s theory of heat and mass transfer provides a framework to model drying porous materials. Coupled partial differential equations governing themoisture and heat transfer can be solved using numerical techniques, and in this paper we solve them analytically in a setting suitable for industrial drying situations. We discuss the nature of the solutions using the physical properties of Pinus ...

We consider the stretching of a thin cylindrical thread with viscosity that depends on temperature. The thread is pulled with a prescribed force while receiving continuous heating from an external axially nonuniform heater. We use the canonical equations derived by Huang et al. (2006) and consider the limit of large dimensionless heating rate. We show that the asymptotic solution depends only o...

The lactic acid bacteria (LAS) play an important role in the production of fermented foods. The development of concentrated cultures of LAS, for inoculating the production vat directly (bulk starters), has eliminated many problems traditionally involved in their preparation and maintenance by the food industry. For industrial use, LAS are often preserved in a frozen or dried form, the latter pr...