The present work was accomplished with the objective of evaluating the drying effect on soy grain physical properties and to analyze different methodologies for determining bulk density and specific gravity. Also, the soy grain shrinkage was evaluated during the drying and different mathematical models were fitted to the experimental data in order to analyze the properties in connection with their moisture content. Based on the obtained results it can be concluded that the reduction in the moisture content promotes the linear decrease in the porosity in the range from 0,31 to 0,15 (b.s.) and increase of both the bulk density and specific gravity. Also the soy grain bulk density and specific gravity values found through the grain chemical composition were lower than the experimental data. The adapted BALA & WOODS [2], RAHMAN, linear and exponential models are appropriate for description of the soy bulk grain shrinkage, while only the adapted BALA & WOODS [2] model is the most appropriate for description of the soy unitary grain shrinkage.
porosity; bulk density; specific gravity; shrinkage; mathematical modeling
