Abstract
This study focuses on the convective drying of apple rings without any extra-heating of the processing ambient air. The lumped reaction engineering approach (REA) model has been employed to determine the rate of drying for the apple rings under forced convection considered as a normal processing regime. The algorithm implies determination the activation energy curve from the accurate ‘reference’ measurements of the drying rate under natural convection conditions. The required for the model implementation mass transfer coefficients for the apple ring samples under natural and forced conditions were obtained in the series of customized experiments. The study does extend the application of REA for the limiting simplest case of convective drying of thick samples under ambient temperature condition."