Mathematical Modeling of Drying of Cauliflower

Drying is a most important method to reduce the moisture content from product to increase its shelf-life. Now a day, drying of agricultural products has great attention. To avoid the problems encountered in traditional methods of drying of agricultural products, tray dryers are used. The experiment was conducted to investigate the drying behavior of Cauliflower by using a tray dryer so that to make its mathematical modeling using exponential and linear model. Blanching treatment was applied to cauliflower samples, which were dried at 500C, 600C and 700C temperatures in a tray dryer. The loss of moisture was recorded at different time intervals up to 1200 minutes. It was observed that, moisture content and moisture ratio of blanched sample was significantly less than that of un-blanched sample for a particular drying time for all the drying temperatures. The nature of drying rate curve was observed to be a non linear during the drying of Cauliflower. Exponential model was found to be the best model for describing the drying behavior of cauliflower.