Optimization of Osmotic Dehydration Process of Rosa canina L. Fruit by Response Surface Methodology

Response surface methodology (RSM) is a collection of statistical and mathematical techniques for designing experiments, modeling, improving, and optimizing processes. The aim of the present study was to optimize osmotic dehydration process of Rosa canina L. fruit by RSM. For this purpose, the effects of independent variables including temperature (20, 30 and 40 ºC), concentration of osmotic solution (40, 50 and 60% w/w) and dehydration time (2, 3 and 4 h) on the responses or dependent variables including water loss (WL), solid gain (SG), and weight reduction (WR) were evaluated. The results showed that all models obtained for WL, SG and WR were suitable to describe the experimental data. Moreover, the desirability function showed that optimum conditions of osmotic dehydration process of Rosa canina L. fruit were osmotic solution temperature of 31.78 ºC, solution concentration of 60 (% w/w) and dehydration time of 3.59 h. Under these conditions, the amount of parameters of WL, SG, and WR were obtained to be 27.38, 3.53 and 23.85 g per 100 g of sample, respectively.