Karakteristik Pengeringan Daun Jeruk Purut (Cytrus hystrix DC) Menggunakan Oven

Abstract

Kaffir lime leaves is one of the useful agricultural commodities that has a good potential for agribusiness. However, a short life time of this product has made a critical problem for agribusiness development. The present study would like to contribute in overcoming this problem by evaluating the performance of microwave drying application for the production of dry kaffir lime leaves. Therefore, the aim of this work was to study the drying characteristic of kaffir lime leaves in a microwave oven in terms of drying rate and to select of the most appropriate thin-layer drying model that can estimate the experimental data. There were three different power levels instead of drying temperatures that have been used in the experiment, i.e. 420, 537 and 723 watt. Two kinds of thin layer drying models namely Page and Newton equations were used to describe the drying process. The results showed that the microwave oven could dehydrate moisture content of kaffir lime leaves from 59.63-64.91% to 4.06-6.12% on wet basis for 3-6 minutes depending upon the microwave power level conditions. The microwave drying rate of kaffir lime leaves ranged between 24.65 and 48.71 %db/minute and revealed an increasing drying rate values when using higher power level of microwave. Newton equation could be the best mathematical model to describe the microwave drying of kaffir lime leaves as it revealed better values of R2 (0.98- 0.99), RMSE (0.0304-0.0486% dry basis) and Percentage Error (7.60-27.57%).