Manpreet SinghDamanpreet Kaur2023-06-252023-06-252022Damanpreet Kaur (2022) Osmo-assisted convective and solar drying of papaya cubes using different natural sweeteners (Unpublished M.Tech. thesis). Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India.https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810197743The present study was conducted on osmo-assisted convective and solar drying of papaya cubes using different natural sweeteners. Papaya is rich in carbohydrates, vitamin A, calcium, iron, and fibre, as well as phosphorus, lipids, magnesium, and amino acids. Papaya was osmotically dehydrated in sugar, jaggery and honey solutions at varying osmotic temperatures, solution concentrations and osmosis times to evaluate mass transfer kinetics. Experiments were conducted to study the effect of osmotic solutions and process parameters on the physico-chemical quality of osmosed papaya cubes and to compare the quality of intermediate moisture papaya cubes obtained by three-stage convective drying and solar drying of osmosed samples. The optimization of osmosis process parameters was done using response surface methodology (RSM) Box-Behnken technique. The drying parameters viz. moisture content, drying rate, and moisture ratio and the quality parameters viz. total colour difference, bulk density, texture profile analysis, total phenolic content, ascorbic acid content, titratable acidity, antioxidant capacity, total flavonoid content, lycopene content and betacarotene content of the osmo-convective and osmo-solar dried product were determined. The results showed that optimized conditions of osmotic temperature, osmotic solution concentration and osmosis time for different natural sweeteners were found to be sugar: 37.98oC, 57.79o Brix, 5.05h, jaggery: 42.12oC, 48.75o Brix, 5h, honey: 41.17oC, 60 o Brix, 5h on the basis of quality responses. Further, osmosed samples dried in a solar dryer had better ephysicochemical quality than convective tray dried samples. Different drying models were fitted to experimental data to assess their coefficient of determination (R2). It was concluded that irrespective of drying method, honey-osmosed papaya had better overall physicochemical quality while the flavonoids were found to maximum in jaggery osmo-dried samples and phenols were found to be maximum for sugar osmo-dried samples. Furthermore, honeyosmosed samples dried at a faster rate in tray drying while sugar-osmosed samples dried at a faster rate in the case of solar drying.EnglishThesis