Simplified and Accurate Mathematical Model for the Analysis of Heat and Moisture Transfer From Food Commodities

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Abstract
The present paper deals with a simple and accurate mathematical model for making reliable heat and mass transfer analyses from high-water–content solids when exposed to a cold air stream. Such physical situations are encountered in the refrigeration industry during air blast cooling of food commodities. The concept of enthalpy potential has been used to develop a simple linear surface boundary condition equation. This equation accounts for the cooling effect due to sensible convective heat transfer as well as the latent cooling effect due to produce desiccation. Investigations on ten fresh samples each of ripe tomato and cucumber established that there is a good agreement between the computed temperatures from the proposed model and the experimentally measured values.