EXCEL DRYFITLAB: AN EXCEL-VBA TOOL FOR THE ESTIMATION OF KINETIC PARAMETERS IN THIN-LAYER DRYING PROCESSES

 Drying is one of the most widely used engineering processes for the preservation of food products. Its objectives are to reduce the water content of the product, hindering microbial growth and the occurrence of chemical and biochemical reactions, enabling safe storage for long periods, in addition to reducing the volume and mass to be transported. The drying process is complex, as it involves the simultaneous transfer of heat and mass, and is affected by the characteristics of the material to be dehydrated and also by the operating conditions. In this context, the mathematical modeling of thin-layer drying has proven to be a valuable tool, the available models are practical and present sufficiently good results. In each of these models, the determination of the parameters that characterize the drying kinetics is obtained through the resolution of a parameter estimation problem, which consists of obtaining the best values for the parameters that minimize the error between the proposed model and the experimental points. In this work, the main objective was the development of a computational tool called DryFitLab – Drying Fit Laboratory, which works as a supplement to Excel. Developed in VBA, the supplement has a user-friendly graphical interface for data entry and integrates tools for estimation, calibration and statistical analysis of kinetic parameters in thin-layer drying processes. The choice for the Excel spreadsheet was motivated by its wide academic and industrial use