Resumen
Industrial application of the pre-treatments used prior to convective drying should take into account the time required for the pre-treatments themselves. In the case of osmotic dehydration (OD), the processing time could be relatively long (up to 120?150 min to reach a pseudo-equilibrium of the mass change), but it offers the possibility to handle underripe and very sour fruits and it could be carried out in batch or continuous lines with fair simple technologies. Moreover, it can be performed at near ambient temperature before drying to bring the partially dewatered products to the convective drying. The spent solution management can also be easily performed. On the other hand, the industrialization of PEF pre-treatment can be easily introduced also in a continuous process since the required time for PEF application is very short (in the present work?10 s) and nowadays there are several equipment suppliers able to scale-up industrial plants from laboratory scale.