Estudo da secagem do resíduo do limão tahiti (Citrus latifólia Tanaka)

Abstract

In recent years, Brazil has expanded its production of citrus fruits, specifically the planting of tahiti lemon (Citrus latifólia Tanaka), as it has an economic potential, in industrial terms for the production of concentrated juices or exports to Europe. An alternative to the waste generated by the industry, would be drying these by-products and incorporating them into processed foods or proposing a destination that is not just disposal. For this reason, the objective of the present work was to evaluate the influence of convective drying in tahiti lemon residue. The drying was carried out under different temperatures (60, 70, 80, 90 ºC), and then evaluated drying curves for the residue of the Tahiti lemon, a mathematical modeling of the collected data, in addition to the calculation of the thermodynamic parameters associated with the process. For each drying condition, the thermal diffusivity of the Tahiti lemon residue is also provided. Based on the statistical parameters, the Page model was the one that best explain the drying kinetics of all the evaluated conditions, among the tested models. The temperature dependence during drying was represented by the Arrhenius equation, with activation energy of 30.86 kJ.mol-1. The enthalpy variations (ΔH) and entropy (ΔS) lower at higher drying temperatures, while the variation in Gibbs free energy (ΔG) was increased with temperature. The values of thermal diffusivity were higher as the highest drying temperatures were used, with the values of order 10-10 to 10-9 m2.s-1.