Modeling of Drying of Almonds: A Multi-Scale Approach

I take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported, guided, and encouraged directly or indirectly throughout my journey of PhD. First and foremost, I am sincerely grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Vivek V. Ranade, for allowing me to pursue PhD under his supervision. I thank him providing valuable guidance, support and encouragement throughout my work. I thank him for giving me the freedom to work on the topic of research. I will always cherish various discussions we had at various stages of the research work. I am thankful to the management of Tridiagonal Solutions for supporting me to pursue my research interest, and register as an Industry-Sponsored PhD student. I specially thank Sandeepak Natu and Damodaran Vedapuri for allowing me to maintain flexible work hours during the course work. I thank my colleagues Praveen, Murtza, Mihir, Shashank, Anand for supporting me during the initial stage of PhD. I am thankful to Dr. Ashish Lele, Dr. Amol Kulkarni, and Dr. Rajnish Kumar for providing valuable inputs during the process of evaluation. I thank Prof. Ashwini Kumar Nangia, Director, and Dr. Saurav Pal, Former Director for providing me an opportunity to work at CSIR-NCL, Pune. I am thankful to my friendly and cooperative lab mates, Akshay, Dhananjay, Ajinkya, Deepankar and Chirag for supporting me during my work at NCL. I am thankful to all the administrative staff at NCL, specially the Student Academic Office for their assistance and support at various instances. I am grateful towards their promptness in getting the paper work completed in a timely manner. I am also thankful to Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), New Delhi for allowing to advance my scientific carrier. AcSIR has provided a great opportunity for working individuals like me to get registered as an Industry-Sponsored student for PhD. I am grateful to all the AcSIR coordinators at NCL, Dr. Chetan Gadgil, Dr.Ashish Orpe and Dr.Sunil Joshi, for their support and guidance at various occasions. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the scientific communications for their suggestions that helped in improving the quality of my work. I would also like to thank my colleague Chandra Prakash Lohia at Furnace Improvements for helping me with formatting, editing and proof reading of thesis. I would like to express my deepest respect and gratitude towards Tejgyan Foundation for all the teachings that helped to balance my work at office, family and pursue my research work all together. Without this it would be very challenging to have a steady progress of my research work. At the end I would like to thank my family, parents, wife and two sons for their unconditional love and support without which it would not be possible to pursue my research work. My wife and two sons have sacrificed lot of weekend's time by allowing me to do my research work. Special thanks to my wife for taking extra responsibility, support and patience during the entire course of my research work.