Experimental And Computational Studies Of Microwave And Solar Dried Food Product

Abstract

Foods materials are consumed for nutritional purposes in the form of fruits, vegetables, plants, and meat. These contain proteins, carbohydrates, and other useful nutritional compounds and these processed foods are rich source of nutrition. Food preservation is a technique to enhance the shelf life of food materials for long-term storage to provide variation in diet and to maintain the availability of agricultural products during the whole year. It can be done by various methods such as drying, freezing, chilling, chemical preservation, and pasteurization, etc. Drying can be done by solar drying, microwave heating, vacuum drying, and some other methods. newlineMicrowave heating is a fast-drying method. It utilizes electrical energy to generate heat energy. Microwave heating and other electricity or coal-based food drying methods are fully based on fossil fuels. Due to the shortage of fossil fuels, solar energy can be a better option to overcome the energy crisis. Solar drying is an economical way for food preservation method and it is available free of cost for every. Solar drying is categorized into direct sun drying (open sun drying) and indirect type solar drying. newlineThe experimental work has been performed according to the objective of the research work. Potato (Solanum tuberosum) is used as a sample material because it is harvested globally for commercial purposes. In the pre-treatment of samples, the potatoes have been washed in the running water and cut in the required dimensions (35 mm x 30 mm), various thicknesses (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5mm), and shapes (slab, cylindrical, and spherical) with the help of a sharp knife. newlineA domestic SAMSUNG, 1200 W microwave oven has been used to heat the potato food sample. The microwave oven has been operated at four different microwave powers such as 100W, 300W, 600W, and 800W. The average temperature of the food samples increases from 300C to 120.50C. Similarly, at higher power level, all samples have consumed approximately 1.5 min to evaporate the moisture content and free moisture co