The conventional practice of sweet potato
drying is performed under sun, which is a time consuming
method (about 56 h), produces inferior quality product with
high microbial contamination (Silayo et al., 2003). In order to
reduce the time of drying and obtain quality final product,
mechanical dryers are mostly employed which not only gives
better quality product, but it avoids the dependency on the
weather and reduces microbial contamination of the product.
It also lowers the product mass and volume. The reduction in
mass and volume improves the efficiency of packaging, storing
and transportation (Jayaraman and Gupta, 2006).
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