Research Projects

The desire to prevent significant quality degradation, short-time process and effective thermal processing has resulted in the utilization of EHD for drying food products. The inactivation effect of EHD on pathogenic microorganisms has also received great attention for the sterilization of food products. Furthermore, conventional dryers used in the industry to date for spice drying are less energy-efficient, cost-inefficient, and operate at high temperatures. These problems pose loss of organoleptic, nutritional properties of food, and environmental concerns. Changes in consumer behaviour towards consuming processed foods with maximum quality and safety forced food processors to look for alternate drying techniques. For keeping the fresh feel and retaining the nutritional qualities of the dried foods scientist has developed Nonthermal technologies. But prolonged drying time, scalability, product-specific and high energy consumption, and environmental concerns are the limitations of the developed technologies. Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) drying is the correct fit to overcome the problems in the other drying technologies. EHD offers cleaner operations and holds huge industrial potential. Studies reported the developed non-thermal technology was observed excellent with issues like superior product quality, less environmental impact, and low energy consumption. Although EHD can offer several benefits in the context of food processing, its application in the drying of food materials is relatively limited, only because the approach remains underexplored. A hand full of studies carried out in the developed countries focused on the feasibility of the technique in drying. In addition, the demand for advanced and emerging technologies for the production of spices is increasing gradually since EO fumigation has been banned in the European Union and the United States because of health and environmental concerns and consumer acceptance to gamma-irradiated products could be a crucial issue. Also, steam sterilization leads to the additional drying cycle to eradicate condensed moisture and degradation of quality attributes of paprika. The desire to meet this demand has resulted in the utilization of EHD for drying of spices. The property that there is no generation of heat and discharge of plasma species in this drying technique significantly restricts the microbial growth and heat-associated deteriorative reactions. Therefore, this project is the first of its kind to develop an EHD drying condition for Indian red chilies with minimum microbial load and maximum quality retention so that they can comply with USFDA and EU safety standards for spices.