title: Comparison of drying characteristic and uniformity of banana cubes dried by pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying, freeze drying and microwave freeze drying.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  To overcome the flaws of high energy consumption of freeze drying (FD) and the non-uniform drying of microwave freeze drying (MFD), pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying (PSMVD) was developed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The results showed that the drying time can be dramatically shortened if microwave was used as the heating source. In this experiment, both MFD and PSMVD could shorten drying time by 50% as compared to the FD process. Depending on the heating method, MFD and PSMVD dried banana cubes showed trends of expansion while FD dried samples demonstrated trends of shrinkage. Shrinkage also brought intensive structure and highest fracturability of all three samples dried by different methods. The residual ascorbic acid content of PSMVD dried samples can be as high as in FD dried samples, which were superior to MFD dried samples.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The tests confirmed that PSMVD could bring about better drying uniformity than MFD. Besides, compared with traditional MFD, PSMVD can provide better extrinsic feature, and can bring about improved nutritional features because of the higher residual ascorbic acid content.
authors: State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology, Jiangnan University, 214122, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China.
authors: Hao
authors: H
authors: Jiang
authors: Min
authors: M
authors: Zhang
authors: Arun S
authors: AS
authors: Mujumdar
authors: Rui-Xin
authors: RX
authors: Lim
mesh_terms: D001205:Ascorbic Acid / Q000032:analysis*; D003890:Desiccation; D004032:Diet; D005511:Food Handling / Q000379:methods*; D005612:Freeze Drying; D005638:Fruit / Q000737:chemistry*; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans; D008872:Microwaves; D028521:Musa / Q000737:chemistry; D009753:Nutritive Value; D014618:Vacuum
chemical_list: D001205:Ascorbic Acid
keywords: banana cubes; drying characteristic; freeze drying; microwave freeze drying; pulse-spouted microwave vacuum drying; uniformity