Sustainable dehydration of Sary Irimshik, a layered-porous fermented dairy product: Comparative kinetics and energy efficiency of convective and infrared drying

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Almaty Technological University, Tole bi av, 100, Almaty, Kazakhstan

10.22124/cjes.2026.10050

Abstract

Sary Irimshik is a traditional layered-porous fermented dairy product whose dehydration behaviour has not previously been characterized in detail, despite its relevance for energy-efficient and microbiologically safe processing of regional dairy resources. Convective (50-55 °C, 0.5-2.0 m s-1, 5-10 mm layer) and infrared (40-60 °C, 5-10 mm layer) drying were studied at two processing stages of the product, a raw curd (initial moisture 70.2%) and a pressed semi-product (initial moisture 33.0%). The resulting kinetics were fitted with the Page and Fick models, and water activity, moisture binding energy and an engineering heat balance for a 10 kg infrared-dryer batch were additionally determined. Drying proceeded entirely in the falling-rate period in all series, with the Page model exponent n ranging from 1.51 to 1.85 for convective drying and from 1.44 to 1.50 for infrared drying (R² = 0.992-0.998), outperforming the Fick model (R² = 0.897) because the effective diffusion coefficient increased from 3.5×10⁻¹¹ to 3.3×10⁻¹⁰ m² s-1 as drying progressed rather than remaining constant. Water activity declined from 0.45 to 0.20 while moisture binding energy rose from 1.95 to 3.92 kJ mol-1 as moisture content fell from 33 to 15%. Infrared drying halved the processing time relative to convective drying (240 versus 480 min) and required about 1.0 kW of thermal power for a 10 kg batch, at a specific heat consumption of 4.24 MJ per kilogram of evaporated water. These findings agree with reports for other diffusion-limited, protein-rich food matrices and indicate that infrared, or combined infrared-convective, drying provides a more energy-efficient and microbiologically safer dehydration route than conventional convective drying for Sary Irimshik and structurally similar dairy products. Infrared-assisted drying is recommended for scale-up trials, together with further work to separate the effect of heating mode from sample geometry on the kinetic exponent.

Keywords

References

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Caspian Journal of Environmental Sciences
Volume 24, Issue 4
October 2026
Pages 1177-1189

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