Drying kinetics of camel milk cream foam using foam mat drying and study its effect on the structure and color of the product

Introduction: One of the products that its production has not been investigated well and is an imported product is cream powder. Foam mat drying is a widespread technique to dehydrate liquid or semi-liquid foods with high viscosity, adhesion and high sugar content, which are usually difficult to dry. Evaluating moisture content over time is the first indication of how the drying process is performed and can be used as a tool to compare the drying behavior of food. The rate of drying, which is expressed as a function of time or moisture content, is also a very important parameter that helps to understand drying properties of a material. Color can also indicate chemical changes in food during the thermal process such as browning and caramelization. Therefore, since in the drying industry, process time, product quality, optimization and equipment design are directly affected by the rate of drying of food, hence, in this study, in the process of drying the camel milk cream by the foam mat drying method, drying operation at temperatures of 45, 60 ,and 75 °C and thicknesses of 1, 3 and 5 mm was performed in a non-continuous cabinet dryer to evaluate the kinetics of drying , structure and color of the dried foam.   Materials and Methods: Camel milk cream was mixed with carboxymethyl cellulose (0.1%), cress seed gum (0.1%) and 80% whey protein concentrate (5%) at 25 ° C. After pasteurization, the samples were stirred with a mixer at a maximum speed of 1500 rpm (5 minutes) for proper aeration. The foam samples were poured into a plate in a thin layer with thicknesses of 1, 3 and 5 mm and then dried in a dryer at temperatures of 45, 60 and 75 ° C until a constant moisture was reached. The process treatments were performed in a completely randomized central composite design (CCD) (5 replications at the center point) for 2 variables at three levels. The effective diffusion coefficient was calculated based on the second Fick's law of diffusion. Then, using Arrhenius equation, which shows the relationship between temperature and effective diffusion coefficient, activation energy was also calculated. After the drying stage, in order to investigate the changes in moisture during the drying, by determining MR, we have used some experimental models that were previously used for drying agricultural products, to fit the experimental data using the statistical software MATLAB 2016. Results and Discussion: The results showed that increasing the temperature from 45 to 75° C reduced the drying time of the samples by almost 50%. Reducing the thickness from 3 to 1 mm led to an 80% reduction in drying time of the samples. The overall effective diffusion coefficient of the tested samples varied between 7.09×10-10 and 8.11× 10-9  m2/s. The increase in the temperature led to an increase in the effective diffusion coefficient of the samples. The activation energy of the samples varied between 25.59 and 38.22 kJ /mol, and  comparison of the means showed that the activation energy of the samples was also increased by increasing the foam thickness. Totally, 17 models were evaluated to investigate the drying kinetics of the samlses and in all cases of foam drying , page and Midilli models with R2 values above than 0.99 and the lowest values of RMSE indicate the best fit with the experimental data among the 17 fitted model. Examining the digital images of the samples also showed that at low temperatures, the structure of the dried foams was smooth and it became more uneven and porous as a result of increasing the temperature. Also, the trend of changes in the parameters of the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) (energy, correlation, and homogeneity) of the samples was almost the same with the changes in temperature and thickness so that, the increase in the drying temperature and a decrease in the thickness of the samples led to a decrease in these parameters. Increasing the foam thickness at high temperatures led to a decrease in the browning index and at low temperatures, led to an increase in the browning index of the samples.