Determination of Kinetic and Phenomenological Models to Describe the Guapeva Drying Process in a Tunnel Type Dryer by Using Differential Evolution

Brazilian cerrado biodiversity plays an important role in different areas, such as food and medicine due to the variety of plant species that can be found. However, this has been poorly studied in order to explore aspects related to food and analysis of crude extracts or isolated compounds. In this context, this contribution aims to determine kinetic and phenomenological models to evaluate the mass and energy transport during the drying operation of Guapeva ( Pouteria gardneriana Radlk ) by formulating and solving two inverse problems considering the Differential Evolution algorithm. The mathematical model that represents the Guapeva drying process considers a one-dimensional differential equation system in spherical coordinates. To solve this system, the Normal Collocation is used as a numerical strategy to integrate the mass and energy balances. The proposed inverse problem considers experimental data obtained in an experiment carried out in a tunnel type dryer to obtain kinetics and thermo-physical parameters. The obtained results demonstrated both the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methodology to solve inverse problems.