In order to find new drying technologies of sea cucumber, the drying characteristics of sea cucumber with far infrared drying were studied in this paper. . The variation disciplines of relative moisture content, drying rate, shrinkage ratio and rehydration ratio of sea cucumber were analyzed, and the effects of drying temperatures on dried sea cucumber products were also studied. 13 kinds of dying models were selected for the best one to simulate the drying kinetics of sea cucumber with far infrared drying. The results showed that the drying temperatures have important influence on the relative moisture content, drying rate, shrinkage ratio and rehydration ratio. During the early stage of drying, the drying rates have positive correlation with the temperature, while negative correlation between the drying rate and temperature appeared in the middle and later stage. The shrinkage ratios and rehydration ratios increased with the increase of drying temperature, and higher temperature resulted in higher shrinkage ratio and rehydration ratio. In conclusion, for sea cucumber, the far infrared drying at 60 ℃ for 14 h was a preferable drying process, while the rehydration ratio reached 5.0 and had good quality. The two-term exponential model had the best precision among the drying models with R2 of 0.993, which could better predict of the changes of relative moisture contents of sea cucumber in far infrared drying.
