The effect of surface water vapour flux on drying of potato

A simultaneous heat and moisture transfer model for drying of potato was first introduced by Wang and Brennan(1) to predict moisture and temperature distributions in a slab-shaped solid. Since no account was taken of the water vapour flux from the sample surface (which they considered to be a limitation in their model), only fair agreement was achieved between the theory and the experiment. In this study, an attempt was made to investigate such an effect on the slab of the same dimensions and under similar conditions as those used by the above authors. As a result, the present experimental data are shown to be closer to the predicted values in comparison with the previous work.