In the present work, the effective moisture diffusivity and activation energy were calculated using an infinite series solution of Fick’s diffusion equation. The results showed that increasing drying temperature accelerated the drying process. All drying experiments had only falling rate period. The average effective moisture diffusivity values varied from 2.807x10 to 6.977x10m s over the tempe...

Animal and poultry manures have been recognized for centuries as organic fertilizers providing essential nutrients to crops and improving soil structure due to their large input of organic matter. Increasing demand for poultry and egg products has led to intensification of the poultry rearing process, resulting in large amounts of poultry manure. Drying can be used to reduce the environmental i...

We report a simulation study on competition between cracking and peeling, in a layer of clay on desiccation and how this is affected by the rate of drying, as well as the roughness of the substrate. The system is based on a simple 2-dimensional spring model. A vertical section through the layer with finite thickness is represented by a rectangular array of nodes connected by linear springs on a...

Wet starch cracks when it dries inhomogeneously, while hot glass cracks when it cools non-uniformly. In both cases, differential shrinkage induced by drying/cooling from the surface causes superficial cracks to grow perpendicular to the surface in different patterns. In contrast with these observations of bulk cracking in brittle materials, when a soft and homogeneously swollen polymer gel drie...

A solar drier assisted with evacuated tube collector is designed and developed to study and examine the drying Kinetics of muscat grapes in Thanjavur, Tamilnadu, India.  During the drying period, temperature at various places, relative humidity, wind velocity and mass of the sample are measured on hourly basis.  The outlet temperature of the collector and temperature within the chamber varies f...

We study the periods that develop in the drying of capillary porous media, particularly the constant rate (CRP) and the falling rate (FRP) periods. Drying is simulated with a 3-D pore-network model that accounts for the effect of capillarity and buoyancy at the liquid-gas interface and for diffusion through the porous material and through a boundary layer over the external surface of the materi...

INTRODUCTION Peppermint is an efficient medicinal plant for the treatment of diseases, and it also can be used to produce raw materials in the pharmaceutical industry. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of various levels of peppermint alcoholic extract on body-weight gain and blood biochemical parameters in adult male Wistar rats. METHODS This experiment was conducte...

In this study rhubarb stem slices were dried as single layers with thickness of 3 mm in the inlet air temperature range of 50-70  and air velocity of 1 ± 0.2 m/s in a laboratory scale cabinet dryer. The effect of drying air temperature on the drying characteristics was determined and the relationship between the drying parameters with temperature and moisture content was examined. Moisture tran...

U ltrastructure of the epicuticular wax of four commercially grown Canadian cultivars of canola (Brassica campestris cvs. Tobin and Candle, B. napus cvs. Altex and W estar) was investigated. Freeze-drying and air-drying methods of specimen preparation for scanning electron microscopy were compared. The freeze-drying method resulted in disruption and possible washing away of wax crystals, wherea...