| Summary: | Indonesia is a tropical country which has a diversity of agricultural
products. One of the agricultural products is mangoes. Mangoes produce in
certain seasons and have a short storage time. The mangoes were abundant in the
harvest, one way to keep the selling price of mangoes stable was done as fruit
processing diversification by drying the mangoes. Drying process which carried
out by utilizing sunbeam was take a long time and highly depend on the weather,
so its need to take a technology which could dry the fruit with a relatively short
time and didn�t depend on the weather. The study attempts to solve these
problems so that the objectives of this study are to determine the effect of
temperature and air flow rate of drying mangoes.
Mangoes fruit drying was done by using a cabinet dryer. The including
variables of the study are : the dependent variable i.e. the moisture content, drying
speed and efficiency of drying, the independent variable i.e. the temperature (40,
50, 60, 70 and 80°C) and air flow rate (0,0078, 0.0154 and 0,0234 m3/s) and the
control variable i.e. the fruit drying time (5 hours), the concentration of sugar
solution (50 % for 4 hours at room temperature) and the concentration of lime
solution (2% for 15 minutes).
The result show that the higher temperatures and greater air flow rates
faster of drying process. It is proved that with the optimum temperature and air
flow rate will have obtained the required moisture content. The optimal treatment
in accordance with the required product are drying with temperature 50°C and air
flow rate 0.0234 m3/s with 17.45% total water content and the result of drying
efficiency in 22.79%.
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