Musa balbisiana Colla blossom has enriched applications as a key constituent of dried vegetable formulations. With restricted prior art, the article addresses the optimality of tray drying characteristics of the blossom from both statistical design and drying kinetics perspective. The process variables in due course of optimization refer to moisture content, antioxidant activity and vitamin C for variation in drying time and temperature. Model fitness, analysis of variance based analysis and numerical optimization were considered during the statistical design of experiments. Drying kinetics involved fitness studies of alternate models, moisture diffusivity and process variable characteristics. Thereby, the sensitivity of both approaches to obtain optimal parameters associated with tray dried product have been targeted for a comparative assessment.
Keywords: Drying kinetics; Optimization; Response surface methodology (RSM); Tray drying.
© Association of Food Scientists & Technologists (India) 2020.