Drying of moist food snacks with innovative slot jet reattachment nozzle

Abstract

Drying of moist porous media such as paper, pulp and food products is one of the most energy intensive processes in industry. Impinging jet nozzles are commonly used in various drying processes. There have been many efforts to improve the transport characteristics of impinging jet nozzles. Utilizing innovative Slot Jet Reattachment (SJR) nozzle is an approach to make the drying process more efficient. This is mainly because these nozzles overcome the high flow rate constraint associated with the traditional Slot Jet (SJ) nozzle. In this paper, the drying characteristics of the SJR nozzle with exit angles of +20˚ and +45˚ are experimentally investigated. The samples used are snack cookies. The results are compared with those of SJ nozzle under the same mass flowrate. The results indicate that significant enhancements in drying rates are achievable with both SJR nozzles compared to SJ nozzle.Keywords: Drying; Porous Food Snack; Slot Jet Reattachment Nozzle; Slot Jet Nozzle