Introducing a new reference value to improve the comparability of quality characteristics of air dried foodstuffs

Besides energy efficiency, product quality is gaining importance in the design of drying processes for sensitive biological foodstuffs. The influence of drying parameters on the drying kinetics of apples has been extensively investigated; the information about effects on product quality available in literature however, is often contradictory. Furthermore quality changes obtained applying different drying parameters are usually hard to compare. As most quality changes can be expressed as zero, first or second order reactions and mainly depend on drying air temperature and drying time, it would be desirable to cross-check the results in function thereof. This paper introduces a method of quality determination using a new reference value, the cumulated thermal load. It is defined as the time integral of the product surface temperature and improves the comparability of quality changes obtained by different experimental settings in drying of apples and tomatoes. It could be shown that quality parameters like color changes and shrinkage during apple drying and the content of temperature sensitive acids in tomatoes vary linearly with the integral of product temperature over time