Infrared Heating in Food Drying: An Overview

AbstractThis article aims to review and analyze the aspects and characteristics related to infrared food drying. Indeed, with a review of 100 relevant publications all dealing with infrared food drying, this article notes that infrared drying has several advantages over other common food drying methods. Shorter drying time, a better final dried product quality, and more energy savings in the process are revealed as the most important advantages of infrared drying over convective heat drying. Infrared dryers can also be easily combined with other drying methods such as hot air, microwave, vibration, and vacuum. This article clearly shows that using infrared heating for food drying purposes has become more popular in the last decade and its application in the industrial drying of different foodstuffs has been employed widely.Keywords: Drying qualityDrying timeEnergy savingFood dryingInfrared radiation