In this article, continuous and intermittent drying of whole
bananas are compared. For discontinuous processes, several tempering
times are used, but supposing the same intermittency ratio.
To describe the processes, empirical and diffusion models are used.
Empirical models were used because they enable to determine
simple expressions for the drying rates. For the diffusion case,
the comparison between continuous and intermittent processes
was performed using the mass transfer Biot number, which is
defined in terms of D and h.