A high accurate scheme for numerical simulation of two-dimensional mass transfer processes in food engineering.

This paper contributes to develop a highly accurate numerical method for solving two-dimensional mass transfer equations during convective air drying of apple slices. The numerical scheme is based on the interpolating the solution of the mentioned equations over the roots of the orthogonal Jacobi polynomials (i.e., the Jacobi-Gauss-Lobatto points) in a nodal form. Moreover, for speeding up the procedure of numerical technique, operational matrices of differentiation are applied to discretize the derivatives of both spatial and temporal variables. After implementing the proposed technique, two-dimensional mass transfer equations would be transferred into the associated systems of linear algebraic equations which can be solved by appropriate iterative solvers such as robust Krylov subspace iterative methods. Some constructed artificial examples are provided to show the efficiency and applicability of the Jacobi pseudo-spectral method for solving two-dimensional mass transfer equations. Finally, a real example is considered and numerical results are validated by the experimental data which confirm the accuracy of the presented numerical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]