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Coating of fruits with edible gums increases the appearance quality, improves the color and reduces their shrinkage at the end of the drying process. In this study, Xanthan and Balangu gums were used to coating of apricot slices during drying in the infrared system and the drying kinetics of the samples were modeled. In this study, apricots were divided into three groups: control (without coating), coated with xanthan gum and coated with balangu seed gum, and then the effect of infrared lamp power (150, 250 and 375 W) and distance of samples from lamps ( 5, 7.5 and 10 cm) on the drying time of the samples were investigated. The concentration of used gum was 0.6% (w/w) and the thickness of apricot slices was 0.5 cm. The results of drying the apricot samples by infrared method showed that with increase in lamps power and decrease in samples distance from the heat source, the drying time decreases. Coating pretreatment increased the drying time of apricots and the drying time of samples coated with balangu seed gum was longer. The average drying time of the control samples, coated with xanthan and balangu gum was 73.11 min, 81.04 min and 83.74 min, respectively. This process was modeled by an artificial neural network with 3 inputs (type of coating, radiation lamp power and lamp distance) and 1 output (drying time). The results of artificial neural network modeling showed that the network with 7 neurons in a hidden layer and using the sigmoid activation function can predict the drying time of coated apricots using an infrared dryer (r=0.974).

Keywords: Artificial neural network, Coating, Drying time, Radiation

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