Drying modeling and water diffusivity in beef meat

The diffusivity of water in meat perpendicular to the fibres was experimentally determined in the range 6.6-40.4 °C using a drying technique. Three different mathematical methods were used to determine the diffusivity from the drying data. The first assumes constant diffusivity, volume and temperature and zero surface resistance to mass transfer. The second assumes a convective boundary condition. The third also takes into account the shrinkage of the sample during drying. Important differences in the calculated diffusivity were found using these three different methods. The model that takes shrinkage into account fits the experimental data better than the other models because it is a better representation of the actual process; the average shrinkage of the meat during drying was 70.3%. The calculated diffusivity was fitted to an Arrhenius type equation to express its dependence with temperature. The correlation coefficient obtained is 0.9888 indicating a good fit.