Results and discussion
The plots of variation of moisture contents with dehydration time are shown in Fig. 1a,b and compared with untreated samples. The rate of change of moisture content was obtained from the graph and plotted against average moisture contents as per Eq. (2) (Fig. 2a,b). Fig. 2a,b shows that a large portion of the moisture from paprika is removed when the rate of drying is constant (constant rate period) and further drying rate was reduced with respect to moisture contents (falling rate period). The relevant values of critical moisture contents are reported in Table 1 for all treatments.