In the modern scenario insufficient of nutrition food is a major problem for the fast increasing population in many developing countries. Banana flowers contain high level of dietary fibre. The comparative analysis of drying kinetics of banana flowers using natural and forced convection solar dryers is the aim of this present study. Drying of banana flowers in forced convection solar dryer aided with evacuated tube collector (ETC) decreases the moisture content from 97.2 (wb%) to 8.4 (wb%) in 11 hours. This is compared with solar cabinet dryer and natural sun drying which takes 15 hours and 19 hours respectively. Ten developed mathematical models are used to evaluate the suitability of fit which identifies the drying kinetics of banana flowers for both solar dryers using IBM SPSS 23 package. The result exhibits that, Midilli et al model has the high value of correlation coefficient (R2 ) and least value of reduced chi – square and root mean square error (RMSE) for the designed dryers showing the suitability of fit for drying of banana flowers. Also it is observed that, the quality and appearance of the solar dried banana flowers using ETC is more acceptable than the natural and cabinet dried Banana flowers
Effect of pre-treatments on solar drying kinetics of red seedless grapes (cv. Monukka)