Modeling the thin-layer drying of bee pollen

Abstract

Bee pollen provides proteins, lipids, vitamins and minerals in bee nutrition. Bee pollen also has a significant nutritive value as a supplement to human nutrition. Fresh bee pollen must be dried in order to reduce water activity for the development of various microorganisms. Convective drying is common method for bee pollen dehydration. In this paper, several drying temperatures (40, 50 and 60◦C) were investigated during the 3 hours convective hot air drying. Several drying models used in literature were fitted to experimentally obtained drying curves in order to find most suitable one. The best fit was achieved with Two-term (for 60◦C) and Hii et al. (for 40◦C and 50◦C) drying models. The coefficient of determination was the primary criterion for selecting the best model to describe the drying curves.