The possibility of using a pseudo-diffusion approach to model mass transfer in osmotic dehydration was investigated through the analysis of mass change and effective diffusivity The mass change was obtained using a computer simulation model andthen the effective diffusivity was calculated according to the mass change. It was shown that the mass transfer in osmotic dehydration was not a unique function of Fourier number for mass transfer as in pure diffusion, but depended on the diffusivity ofsolute and dimension of tissue. In addition, the effective diffusivity used in this pseudo-diffusion approach varied non-linearly with processing time. Therefore the model developed through this pseudo-diffusion approach had no predictive ability unlessthe variation of the effective diffusivity could be estimated.
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