Continuous Potato Chip Process

Continuous conveyor, through-circulation, or impinging jet-fluidized bed dryers (sometimes called jet-zone dryers) are often used in the wood processing (e.g., wafer board) and food processing (e.g., potato chips, etc.) industries. In the jet-zone process, hot air jets impinge on a thin layer of wet chips, which are conveyed mechanically the high-velocity jets pseudo-fluidize the material to accomplish uniform drying. Wood chips, for example, may be dried in a rotary or a conveyor dryer. 

Reachons such as these usuahy take place in continuous reactors such as chip (memory or potato) processing lines, retorts, kilns, and conveyer belts in which the sohds pass through an oven with reactive gases such as air or perhaps in a fluidized sohd bed reactor as in the shot from guns puffed rice and other grain cereals or in a slurry reactor such as a vegetable oil or fat fryer. Some typical sohds reactors are sketched in Figure 9-2. 

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