A Study on Meat Drying Process Using the Porous Media Approach. Part 1: Experiments

This paper presents a basic work that supplies complementary knowledge and open new perspectives to mathematical modeling of salami ripening. An experimental apparatus was realized for controlled meat drying and its procedure set up in order to allow a simple, but significant investigation on the fate of water contained and transported in a minced meat matrix, at various times throughout the drying process. The experimental results are discussed in terms of weight loss as well as space and time profiles of moisture in the specimen. Then, they are favorably compared to the predictions of a mathematical model of drying, which is based on a porous media description of the minced meat and simply adopts a literature correlation of moisture diffusion. To this end, the Comsol Multiphysics®4.3 software was used, with the “transport in porous media” physics.