Air Drying and Drying Curves

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04/02/2025 Added

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Air Drying and Drying Curves by Robert Sunderland. 2025 High Pressure Processing and Dehydration Workshop

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[00:00:00.000]All right. Well, welcome to the drying portion of the dehydration course. This is Wenger
[00:00:09.920]Manufacturing. A couple of my colleagues here, Adrian Martinez, Adrian Strom, and I am Robert
[00:00:18.160]Sunderland. We are here to talk about the practical applications of drying and how we go about
[00:00:25.840]testing the new and different product. So to do that, we have brought from our research center
[00:00:33.440]in Sabatha. Again, about an hour and a half away is our research facility. We have several dryers
[00:00:41.560]in our research facilities, several extruders. This small dryer is a portable unit. This is one
[00:00:47.800]of three that we have. The other two happen to be in Europe right now. The concept is all very
[00:00:54.060]similar, where we are
[00:00:55.740]mimicking what is happening in a large production machine. So in this case, what we've done, Elliott,
[00:01:03.360]would you mind pulling some of the raw material out? A few weeks ago, we made some
[00:01:09.780]material in our technical center. It's been chilled and frozen, so essentially
[00:01:15.420]this is a pet food product that is about 40% fresh meat. We've done the lab analysis
[00:01:25.640]behind it. It's about 34% moisture content. So our objective, like if this
[00:01:33.140]was a production facility, is to take this 34% moisture content and bring it
[00:01:39.440]right down to 8% moisture content. So to do that, we're going to mimic what we
[00:01:43.940]would be doing in our production dryers. And again, Elliot, you might explain how
[00:01:48.600]we do this. I'll start with it's very basic. You're going to have kind of two
[00:01:52.640]things on this machine we can control.
[00:01:55.540]Temperature and airflow. So basically inside of here there's a electric heater
[00:02:02.800]and a fan, blows air up through there. Real quick, I'll pass around kind of the
[00:02:07.840]concept here of what this machine will do. It provides us with a drying curve of
[00:02:13.100]kind of unique products or anything we don't know how to dry. So this was a
[00:02:19.120]RevoPortioner. You can pass that around. That was formed on a
[00:02:25.440]RevoPortioner basically and so then we brought it into the lab dryer to
[00:02:35.980]basically bring that down to 8% moisture. So I do currently have this
[00:02:40.500]machine running. It's set at 120 degrees Celsius and a fan speed of 20ish
[00:02:48.480]percent but yeah you basically would take your canister here. We'll fill it to
[00:02:55.340]kind of I guess three inches bed depth basically. That's about three inches. So
[00:03:06.700]downside of today something happened to our scale. It's not working properly but
[00:03:11.940]we can show you the function of it. Without that essentially you'd enter
[00:03:16.260]your test information into the computer and then you just open it up to allow
[00:03:23.100]air flow to come up through there.
[00:03:25.240]It's a loss in weight system.
[00:03:27.120]So because of the scale on here, say we let this dry for three minutes or a minute and a half,
[00:03:35.200]you would just close that, bring it over to the scale, capture your weight, put it back on to the machine or to this area,
[00:03:45.320]get air moving back through it, and you'd continue that until you hit your 8% moisture target off the dryer here.
[00:03:55.500]So, again, very basic, not a lot to change or tweak on this machine, but it helps Robert size up and get the correct dryer sizing for whatever their production might be.
[00:04:10.600]Corn curls, pet food, texturized proteins.
[00:04:14.660]Yep, and again, so really, the beauty of this machine is it really allows us to capture a lot of data in like a one day worth of work.
[00:04:24.660]Yep.
[00:04:25.000]If this was like a, even our lab laboratory, which again has extruders that may run all the way down to one ton an hour,
[00:04:32.260]we would need to get the extruder up, get it, you know, equilibrized out, collect samples, start the drying test,
[00:04:42.040]and these can take quite a while, especially if we're testing at maybe some low or modest temperatures.
[00:04:48.980]It may take three minutes in between samples, or it may take,
[00:04:54.900]like, three hours retention time, and then we would need to start another test
[00:05:00.600]and another test and another test.
[00:05:02.520]So basically what this allows us to do is to do, you know,
[00:05:06.200]three or four days' worth of work in our technical center
[00:05:10.180]if what we really care about is just the dryer.
[00:05:13.400]So we can change the simple things, temperature, airflow, bed depth.
[00:05:18.660]We can also add humidity, too, if we want, so we have more or less humid.
[00:05:24.720]So really what this allows us to do is scale up and get a snapshot of how that particular product dries.
[00:05:32.740]Here are some examples of some other products that we have.
[00:05:36.800]Again, all of these are down the line of air-dried, so all of these happen to be pet food.
[00:05:44.460]Several were made with a Revo Farmer.
[00:05:48.300]So again, typically 60% fresh meat mixed with 40%.
[00:05:54.300]40% cereal grain.
[00:05:56.340]And then they were formed with a Revo.
[00:05:59.860]Some were quite large.
[00:06:00.860]This is like a small chicken strip size product.
[00:06:05.680]And then from this, we would take it in this dryer and get a drying curve for this product.
[00:06:10.820]Again, different product sizes, different moisture contents.
[00:06:14.880]Generally speaking, the smaller the size is, the quicker the product dries.
[00:06:21.540]But again, there are applications.
[00:06:24.280]There are applications where somebody may want to treat, to show, to give to a pet.
[00:06:28.140]And again, this may just be the size of the product we're dealing with.
[00:06:31.600]So this product will probably take four times the retention time, same exact product if
[00:06:38.120]it was this size.
[00:06:39.900]So really nothing magical about it, time, temperature, airflow, and a combination of
[00:06:45.900]that to back calculate the size of the machine that you need.
[00:06:49.000]Thank you.
[00:06:50.000]Thank you.

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