The study of moisture kinetics and mass transfer parameters during hot air frying in potato chips

The production of healthier fried foods requires the adaptation of industrial processes. In this context, air frying is an alternative to deep oil frying to Potato products such as chips to obtain with lower fat content. One of the most important points in designing, modeling and optimizing the frying processes is to precise determination the mass transfer parameters. Accordingly, in this research were investigated, the effects of mass transfer parameters such as effective penetration coefficient, mass dimensionless Biot number and mass transfer coefficient as well as activation energy in three temperatures and two air flow velocities. In this study, for the first time, air flow velocity was used as a variable factor in hot air frying, which also had a significant effect on decreasing moisture content.The results showed that all the mass transfer parameters as well as the relative constant of water reduction were directly proportional to the temperature and increased with increasing process temperature. At different flow velocities, all the parameters in except of the Biot number were increasing. The results of the activation energy obtained using the Arrhenius equation were also estimated at lower airflow velocities.