Abstract: Drying is one of the major methods to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. With the development of computer technology, computational fluid dynamics has been more and more widely used in the field of fruit and vegetable drying. This technique can simulate and predict the kinetic phenomena such as fluid flow, heat and mass transfer during the drying process of fruits and vegetables, and output the visualization results. Compared with traditional experiments, computational fluid dynamics has the advantages of energy saving, low cost, fast simulation speed and high flexibility. This article elaborates on the working principle of computational fluid dynamics in the field of fruit and vegetable drying, and reviews recent progress in the application of computational fluid dynamics to different fruit and vegetable drying methods as well as in the numerical modeling of coupled shrinkage. Finally, this review concludes with an outlook on future directions of computational fluid dynamics in the field of fruit and vegetable drying. It is our hope that this review will provide new insights and references for researchers.

Key words: computational fluid dynamics; fruit and vegetable drying; simulation; shrinkage