than the ones with lower chain densities. In addition, while the energy
requirement for dehydrating the higher density systems with
20 chains increases as dehydration proceeds because of reduced
pore sizes and enhanced water–macromolecule interactions, it appears
to remain constant for the lower density systems, which can
be taken to imply that the distributions of water potential energy
and dehydration energy requirement per unit volume are much
more uniform in food systems with low polysaccharide densities.
However, it would be misleading if such constant energy requirements
are directly compared to that of pure water because they
are averaged over all water molecules in the pore space, including
strongly-bound, weakly-bound, and liquid-like water molecules. In
fact, it is highly possible that in all food systems where the rate of
water removal is not uniform, the results of this work would suggest
that water removal in such systems depends strongly on the
distributions of pore sizes and locations of water molecules with
respect to the polysaccharide chains. It could be further inferred
that because of the chain flexibility and strong water–macromolecule
interactions, certain residual amount of water molecules can
be trapped in small pores or by narrow bottlenecks and, thus, they
might not be removed by typical dehydration means.