POSSIBILITY OF USING PSEUDO-DIFFUSION APPROACH TO MODEL MASS TRANSFER IN OSMOTIC DEHYDRATION

The possibility of using a pseudo-diffusion approach to model mass transfer in osmotic dehydration wasinvestigated through the analysis of mass change and effective diffusivity. The mass change was obtained using a computer simulation model and then the effective diffusivity was calculated according to the mass change. It was shown that the mass transfer in osmotic dehydration was not a unique function of Fourier number for mass transfer as in pure diffusion, but depended on the diffusivity of solute and dimension of tissue. In addition, the effective diffusivity used in this pseudo-diffusion approach varied non-linearly with processing time. Therefore the model developed through this pseudo-diffusion approach had no predictive ability unless the variation of the effective diffusivity could be estimated.