Convective air drying is a widely used technology for production of dehydrated fruits and vegetables due to its low equipment and operation cost.[5–9]Much research has been carried out to investigate the kinetics of apricots by convective drying. The principal drying parameters of convective drying involve air temperature, absolute humidity,air velocity, etc.[10] It has been commonly considered that the higher the drying temperature and air velocity or the lower the absolute humidity, the higher the drying rate.[11,12] Togrul and Pehlivan[13] studied the thin-layer solar drying of apricot under different air flow rates (50,60, and 70 kg=h) and found that the drying time was decreased about 15% when the air flow rate increased from 50 to 70 kg=h. Karabulut et al.[14] evaluated the effect of hot air drying under different temperatures (50, 60, 70, and 80 C) and sun drying on color values and b-carotene content of apricot. Bon et al.
[15] proposed a diffusional model to simulate the drying kinetics of apricots under convective drying at different temperatures from 50 to 90 C. Xiao et al.[16] investigated the air impingement drying characteristics of apricot and found that the drying time was reduced about
40% when the drying temperature increased from 50 to 65 C. Guo et al.[11] experimentally studied the solar drying characteristics of apricots and indicated that the absolute humidity should be controlled at a relatively low level during the initial period.