Effect of pretrature with ultrasound in convention drying kinetics of bananas (musa paradisiaca)

The use of ultrasound in food processing has increased in the last decade due to the reduction in times, temperatures, microbial and enzymatic inactivation, extraction of components of great interest to different industries; without altering or modifying its nutritional or organoleptic value during the transformation processes of raw materials into products with added value. Considering itself, a green technology by not causing a negative impact on the environment. In this work, the effect of US pretreatment (40KHz/130W/30°C /10, 20 and 30 min) on convective drying at 60°C / 2m / s of banana (musa paradisiaca) was evaluated. A diffusion model was used to describe the drying kinetics and to quantify the influence of the US on the effective diffusivity of water. Observing that the US significantly increased (p> 0.05) the drying speed in all the samples treated with an average reduction of 31% in the drying time with respect to the control treatment; reaching a weight loss of 77% with respect to the initial weight (3.8 to 0.9 g.). The exponential model is the most adequate to predict the experimental curves of banana drying and showed that the application of US increased both the effective diffusivity and the mass transfer coefficient, as corroborated by the values of the explained variance of 98.5 a 99.3%.