New approach to the calculation of pistachio powder hysteresis

Abstract

Abstract Moisture sorption isotherms for pistachio powder were determined by gravimetric method at temperatures of 15, 25, 35 and 40°C. A selected mathematical models were tested to determine the best suitable model to predict isotherm curve. The results show that Caurie model had the most satisfactory goodness of fit. Also, another purpose of this research was to introduce a new methodology to determine the amount of hysteresis at different temperatures by using best predictive model of isotherm curve based on definite integration method. The results demonstrated that maximum hysteresis is related to the multi-layer water (in the range of water activity 0.2-0.6) which corresponds to the capillary condensation region and this phenomenon decreases with increasing temperature.