Study of the hot air drying process of chicken breast by non-invasive techniques

Food drying is one of the main unit operations for food preservation and it is based on the difference of chemical potential between the product and a fluid with lower chemical potential. The objective of this work was the development of a thermodynamic model of chicken meat drying process using infrared thermography; also the viability of using dielectric spectroscopy as a monitoring system was analyzed. A thermodynamic model has been developed to predict the expansion/contraction phenomena of poultry meat throughout the drying process. Moreover, it was demonstrated that permittivity is a non-destructive method to monitor the evolution of drying process. Keywords: Poultry meat, hot air drying, permittivity, infrared, drying kinetics.