Sweet potato is increasingly becoming important and popular as food stuff all over the
world. Therefore investigation of thin layer drying of sweet potato slices in three different dimensions
was carried out between 50oC and 80oC in tray dryer using hot air at a flow rate of 2.5 m/s and 10%
relative humidity. Eight thin-layer drying kinetic models were assessed on blanched and unblanched
sweet potato slices presented in three different dimensions. The drying rate was observed to decrease
with thickness and mass at a constant drying temperature. Also, the drying rate was found to increase
with temperature and the blanched slices dried faster than unblanched slices. The eight models
investigated fitted the experimental data of the six sweet potato samples between 50oC and 80oC
adequately. However, Page model was found to be the best for all the samples. The results obtained
are comparable to some of the reported works.
Keywords: sweet potato, thin-layer drying models, page model, tray dryer, diffusion mechanism