ABSTRACT
Radio frequency (RF) drying is an emerging and promising technology for the drying of agricultural products and foods, characterized by rapid and uniform heating, deep penetration, and low energy consumption. RF-related hybrid drying has attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry over the past decades due to increasing concerns over product quality and production costs. This chapter examines the principles, characteristic, recent applications of RF drying. It also describes the advantages of combined RF drying with convective drying, vacuum drying, and spouted and fluidized bed drying. Finally, it provides suggestions on future research directions to realize industrial applications that may be limited by the technical and economic reasons so far and improve the RF drying.
