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Mathematical Modeling of Withering Characteristics of Tea Leaves

H. M. Ghodake , T. K. Goswami & A. Chakraverty
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Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India Published online: 06 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: H. M. Ghodake , T. K. Goswami & A. Chakraverty (2006): Mathematical Modeling of Withering Characteristics of Tea Leaves, Drying Technology: An International Journal, 24:2, 159-164 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07373930600558979

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Drying Technology, 24: 159164, 2006 Copyright # 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0737-3937 print/1532-2300 online DOI: 10.1080/07373930600558979

Mathematical Modeling of Withering Characteristics of Tea Leaves

H. M. Ghodake, T. K. Goswami, and A. Chakraverty
Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

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The withering characteristics of tea leaves were examined for different temperatures. Tea leaves were withered at a temperature range of 2045C with a constant air velocity of 1.1 m/s. The experimental results illustrated the absence of constant-rate drying period and withering took place only in the falling-rate period. During the falling-rate period, at constant drying air flow rate, the drying rate increased and drying time decreased with the increase in drying air temperature. Drying models of Henderson and Pabis and Page were evaluated based on mean bias error (EMB), root mean square error (ERMS), correlation coefficient (R2), and the chi square (v2 ). The Henderson and Pabis model was found to be a better model for describing the withering characteristics of tea leaves for each of the temperatures of 20, 25, 30, and 35C. The values obtained from Page model were found to be more reasonable for temperatures of 40 and 45C than the other model. Both the models closely fitted the withering data within a certain range of temperature. The Henderson and Pabis model gave better prediction and satisfactorily described the withering characteristics of tea leaves at temperatures lower than 40C whereas the Page model fitted well at temperatures greater than 40C. Keywords Tea leaves; Withering; Drying characteristics; Drying models

the quality of the finished product, the physical effects of withering are considered to be very important in traditional processing. The study of the drying behavior of different products has recently been a subject of interest, e.g., apricot,[1,2] grape,[3] black tea,[4,5] banana,[6] green pepper, stuffed pepper, pumpkin, green bean, and onion,[7] rough rice,[8] eucalyptus globules,[9] and mulberry.[10] Much work on withering characteristics of tea leaves has not been reported. Different mathematical models have been reported to explain the drying characteristics of various products other than tea leaves. Henderson and Pabis, Lewis, Page, and modified Page are the commonly used models to describe the drying characteristics of biological materials. The major objectives of the present work were to describe the drying characteristics for withering of tea leaves and statistically analyze the drying data to develop suitable drying models. MATERIALS AND METHODS Experimental Procedure Tea leaves of variety TV-25 were plucked from the IIT Kharagpur tea plantation sight. The plucking was done in the morning so as to have good plucked tea leaves. Fine plucking was done so that two leaves and a bud was collected. After plucking, the tea leaves were spread in an open area to condition them. Experiments were performed to determine the effect of process variables on the thin-layer withering characteristics of tea leaves. For withering of tea leaves, a batch dryer was used. The freshly plucked leaves were placed on the screen of the dryer after noting the initial weight of the sample. Withering was conducted at six temperatures in the range of 2045C with an increment of 5C. The velocity of air was kept constant at 1.1 m=s.[5] Prior to placing the sample in the drying chamber, the system was run for at least one hour to obtain the steady conditions. The sample was placed on the sample holder.

INTRODUCTION The withering of fresh leaf is the first and indispensable stage in orthodox tea processing. In practice, withering is a rather simple operation, but since it is an important process and theoretically rather complicated, much attention will have to be paid to this subject. The withering is actually partial drying of tea leaves. It is carried out to condition the leaf physically for the next operation in rolling either in orthodox or any other rolling machine. Besides physical changes, chemical changes take place during withering. The leaf has to attain a certain degree of withering before it is suitable to roll well. Though these changes certainly affect
Correspondence: T. K. Goswami, Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur-721302, West Bengal, India; E-mail: tkg@agfe.iitkgp. ernet.in

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GHODAKE, GOSWAMI, AND CHAKRAVERTY

N 1X MRpre;i MRexp;i N i 1

The experiment was done by weighing the sample tray outside the chamber periodically using an electronic balance placed adjacent to the test chamber. The accuracy of the weighing system was 0.1 g. The weighing procedure took not more than 15 s after removing the sample tray from the chamber and this method was sufficiently accurate for generating reproducible drying curves. In the initial stages of each drying run, weights were recorded at every 2 min interval followed by every 3 min and finally at every 5 min, thus gradually increasing the time interval until the end of the withering process. The air velocity was measured by a hot wire anemometer with an accuracy of 0.05 m=s.

"

# 3

EMB

where MRexp,i is the ith experimental moisture ratio, MRpre,i is the ith predicted moisture ratio, N is the number of observations, n is the number of constants in drying model, and MRexpmean is the mean value of experimental moisture ratio.[1,2] RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Withering During withering, drying characteristics of tea leaves are shown as in Figs. 1 and 2. These figures reveal that the drying air temperature has a significant influence on drying rate at a certain air velocity and relative humidity. It is clearly observed that the withering of tea leaves takes place under the falling-rate period. During the falling-rate period, at a constant air flow rate, the drying rate increases and drying time decreases with the increase in drying air temperature. Thus, a higher drying air temperature produced a higher drying rate and, consequently, the drying time decreased. Results are in agreement with work done previously.[9,19] From Fig. 1 it is observed that time required for reducing the moisture content of tea leaves from initial moisture content of 300% (d.b.) to final moisture content of 122.2% (d.b.) is 860, 590, 350, 230, 120, and 100 min. at temperatures of 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, and 45C respectively. Figures 1 and 2 also indicate that initially the drying rate is fairly high at any temperature and subsequently it falls down. The time up to which the drying rate is high differs depending upon the temperature of the drying air as shown in Table 2. Drying Models for Withering As the tea leaves were collected at different times from the tea garden, it is obvious that the initial moisture content of all the runs was not the same. In order to normalize the drying curves, the data involving percentage dry basis moisture content versus time were transformed to a dimensionless parameter of moisture ratio versus time.[9,20] Also, the moisture ratio is used in different drying models (Table 1).

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Analysis of Withering Data A large number of models have been proposed in the literature for drying of different materials.[4,8,1116] In the present study, two drying models were used to explain withering characteristics of tea leaves as shown in Table 1. Recently, Wang et al.[17] have given a comprehensive set of correlations for thin-layer drying data using MATLAB.

Validation of Drying Model Withering curves were fitted to the experimental data using two different equations. The reduced v -square, root mean square error (ERMS), and mean bias error (EMB) were used as the primary criteria to select the best equation to account for variation in the drying curves of the dried samples[1,2,7,14,15,18] and to determine the goodness of the fit. The lower the values of the reduced v -square, the better the goodness of the fit. These statistical values can be calculated as follows: v
2

PN

i 1

MRexp;i MRpre;i 2 N n

ERMS

s PN 2 i1 MRpre;i MRexp;i N

TABLE 1 Different drying model Model name Henderson and Pabis Model MR Formula
M Me M0 Me

Parameters M, moisture content of tea leaves, % (d.b.); Me, equilibrium moisture content, % (d.b.); M0, initial moisture content, % (d.b.); MR, moisture ratio, k0, drying rate constant in h1; t, time in h; A0, model coefficient; n, exponent

A0 expk0 t

Page Model

M Me MR M expk0 tn 0 Me

MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF WITHERING CHARACTERISTICS OF TEA LEAVES

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FIG. 1.

Moisture content versus drying time at different temperatures for withering of tea leaves.

FIG. 2. Drying rate versus average moisture content at different temperatures for withering of tea leaves.

Figures 3 and 4 show typical drying characteristics (moisture ratio versus time) for withering of tea leaves at different temperatures. The withering data were then fitted to Henderson and Pabis and Page models, based on the moisture ratios. The models were evaluated based on mean bias error (EMB), root mean square error (ERMS), correlation coefficient (R2), and chi-square (v2 ).[4,6,11] The details of the statistical analysis are presented in Tables 3 and 4. The R2 values for the Henderson and Pabis and Page models were greater than 0.9 at all drying air temperatures.[21] The EMB, ERMS, and v2 values were found to be below 0.1630, 0.9368, and 0.934, respectively, for all drying air temperatures. Though the ERMS, EMB, and R2 values

TABLE 2 Moisture content reduced at different drying rate for different temperatures Time required to reduce moisture content (h) Temp. (C) 20 25 30 35 40 45 From 78 to 67% (w.b.) 2.27 1.79 1.52 1.09 0.56 0.51 From 67 to 56% (w.b.) 10.57 7.44 3.77 2.5 1.22 0.99

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FIG. 3. Experimental and predicted logarithmic moisture ratio at different drying time for Henderson and Pabis model.

obtained for the two models were quite reasonable, the values obtained by the Henderson and Pabis model were found to be more suitable for temperatures of 20, 25, 30, and 35C in contrast to the same by the Page model, which was found to be more suitable for temperatures of 40 and 45C. The experimental results also illustrated the absence of constant-drying period and the entire drying took place only under the falling-rate period. This indicates that diffusion is the most likely mechanism governing moisture movement in the tea leaves. The results are corroborated by the observations made by Temple and Boxtel[5] who reported the absence of the constant-rate period during drying of black tea (African variety).

Table 4 illustrates the estimated values of the parameters involved with the Henderson and Pabis and Page models along with their corresponding R2, ERMS, EMB, and v2 between the experimental and calculated moisture ratios for withering. CONCLUSIONS The following conclusions can be drawn from the present study: The withering of tea leaves took place under the falling-rate period only.  The Henderson and Pabis model gave better predictions than the Page model and satisfactorily


FIG. 4. Experimental and predicted logarithmic moisture ratio at different drying time for Page model.

MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF WITHERING CHARACTERISTICS OF TEA LEAVES

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TABLE 3 Parameters of different models Coefficients of equation Model name Henderson and Pabis Temp. C 20 25 30 35 40 45 20 25 30 35 40 45 No. of observations 35 33 30 27 22 21 35 33 30 27 22 21 No. of constants 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 A0 0.9485 0.9287 0.9525 0.9703 0.9568 0.9925 k0, h1 0.0582 0.0881 0.1717 0.244 0.5326 0.6713 0.1440 0.2040 0.2525 0.2959 0.5989 0.6951 n 0.5281 0.5189 0.7200 0.7686 0.8754 1.0385

Page

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TABLE 4 Statistical results of the Henderson and Pabis model and Page model Model name Henderson and Pabis Temp. C 20 25 30 35 40 45 20 25 30 35 40 45 R2 0.9944 0.9906 0.9966 0.9975 0.9925 0.9939 0.9624 0.9722 0.9954 0.99 0.9967 0.9986 EMB 0.0000491 0.0001290 0.0001267 0.00001381 0.0006133 0.0007773 0.004009 0.002262 0.0005683 0.0014663 0.0006052 0.0003359 ERMS 0.000290733 0.00073983 0.000693782 0.000071784 0.002810646 0.003645732 0.023715028 0.012994897 0.00311289 0.007619099 0.002773549 0.001575553 Chi-square 8.965 10 8 5.827 10 7 5.157 10 7 5.565 10 9 8.731 10 6 1.462 10 5 0.00059649 0.00017976 1.038 10 5 6.2695 10 5 8.5023 10 6 2.7306 10 6

Page

Note. R2, Correlation coefficient; EMB, Mean bias error; ERMS, Root mean square error.

described the withering characteristics of tea leaves at temperatures lower than 40C.  The Page model gave a better prediction of the withering characteristics of tea leaves at or greater temperatures than 40C. NOMENCLATURE A0 Model coefficient d.b. Dry basis EMB Mean bias error ERMS Root mean square error k0 Drying rate constant (h 1)

M MR M0 Me MRexp;i MRpre;i MRexpmean n R2 t v2 ; v-square

Moisture content (% d.b.) Moisture ratio Initial moisture content (% d.b.) Equilibrium moisture content (% d.b.) ith Experimental moisture ratio ith Predicted moisture ratio Mean value of experimental moisture ratio Exponent Correlation coefficient Time (h) Chi-square

164 REFERENCES

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