Modelling the Drying Kinetics of Maize in a Microwave Environment

Microwave drying of grains is fundamentally different from either convection or conduction drying. Drying of cereal grains appears to proceed mainly in the period when the drying rate is decreasing (in the falling rate period), a characteristic of internally controlled diffusion. However, the analytical solution to Fick's second law of diffusion for a homogeneous, isotropic sphere with constant initial and boundary conditions does not adequately describe the drying behaviour. In an attempt to overcome this problem, the moisture ratio was written in terms of the surface moisture content rather than the equilibrium value. The associated surface drying coefficient, as determined by an iterative technique, was found to be expressible as a linear function of the initial free moisture content of the grain. The resulting empirical model better described the observed drying kinetics. This approach also resulted in good fits to independent data from experiments on convective drying of rough rice, microwave drying of wheat and combined microwave-fluidized bed drying of wheat.