Microwave drying of mango ginger (Curcuma amada Roxb): prediction of drying kinetics by mathematical modelling and artificial neural network

Curcuma amada (Mango ginger) was dried at four different power levels ranging 315–800 Wto determine the
effect of microwave power on moisture content, moisture ratio, drying rate, drying time and effective
diffusivity. Among the fifteen thin layer drying models considered for evaluating the drying behaviour, the
semi-empirical Midilli et al., model described the drying kinetics very well with R2 > 0.999. Drying rate and
effective diffusivity increased as the microwave power output increased. Activation energy was estimated by a
modified Arrhenius type equation and found to be 21.6 kW kg)1. A feed-forward artificial neural network
using back-propagation algorithm was also employed to predict the moisture content duringMWdrying and
found adequate to predict the drying kinetics with R2 of 0.985.