Effects of infrared power output and sample mass on drying behaviour, colour parameters, ascorbic acid degradation, rehydration characteristics and some sensory scores of spinach leaves were investigated. Within both of the range of the infrared power outputs, 300–500 W, and sample amounts, 15–60 g, moisture content of the leaves was reduced from 6.0 to 0.1±(0.01) kg water/kg dry base value. It was recorded that drying times of the spinach leaves varied between 3.5–10 min for constant sample amount, and 4–16.5 min for constant power output. Experimental drying data obtained were successfully investigated by using artificial neural network methodology. Some changes were recorded in the quality parameters of the dried leaves, and acceptable sensory scores for the dried leaves were observed in all of the experimental conditions.

Saccharamyces cerevisia known as baker’s yeast is a product used in various food industries. Worldwide economic competition makes it a necessity that industrial processes be operated in optimum conditions, thus maximisation of biomass in production of saccharamyces cerevisia in fedbatch reactors has gained importance. The facts that the dynamic fermentation model must be considered as a constraint in the optimisation problem, and dynamics involved are complicated, make optimisation of fed-batch processes more difficult. In this work, the amount of biomass in the production of baker’s yeast in fed-batch fermenters was intended to be maximised while minimising unwanted alcohol formation, by regulating substrate and air feed rates. This multiobjective problem has been tackled earlier only from the point of view of finding optimum substrate rate, but no account of air feed rate profiles has been provided. Control vector parameterisation approach was applied the original dynamic optimisation problem which was converted into a NLP problem. Then SQP was used for solving the dynamic optimisation problem. The results demonstrate that optimum substrate and air feeding profiles can be obtained by the proposed optimisation algorithm to achieve the two conflicting goals of maximising biomass and minimising alcohol formation.