One approach to improve sustainable agro-industrial fruit production is to add value to the waste generated in pulp extraction. The processing of cumbeba (Tacinga inamoena) fruits generates a significant amount of waste, which is discarded without further application but can be a source of bioactive compounds, among other nutrients. Among the simplest and most inexpensive forms of processing, convective drying appears as the first option for the commercial utilization of fruit derivatives, but it is essential to understand the properties of mass transfer for the appropriate choice of drying conditions. In this study, cumbeba waste was dried at four temperatures (50, 60, 70 and 80 °C). Three diffusion models were fitted to the experimental data of the different drying conditions. Two boundary conditions on the sample surface were considered: equilibrium condition and convective condition. The simulations were performed simultaneously with the estimation of effective mass diffusivity coefficients (Def) and convective mass transfer coefficients (h). The validation of the models was verified by the agreement between the theoretical prediction (simulation) and the experimental results. The results showed that, for the best model, the effective mass diffusivities were 2.9285 × 10-9, 4.1695 × 10-9, 8.1395 × 10-9 and 1.2754 × 10-8 m2/s, while the convective mass transfer coefficients were 6.4362 × 10-7, 8.7273 × 10-7, 8.9445 × 10-7 and 1.0912 × 10-6 m/s. The coefficients of determination were greater than 0.995 and the chi-squares were lower than 2.2826 × 10-2 for all simulations of the experiments.
Keywords: activation energy; analytical solution; by-product; convective mass transfer coefficient; drying kinetics; effective mass diffusivity.