Different aspects of soybean drying such as energy and exergy analyses, quality, mass transfer parameters, and modeling of drying kinetics were investigated in a microwave dryer. Results showed that energy and exergy efficiency increased with increasing microwave power, while values of energy efficiency (33.70 to 66.0%) were higher than exergy efficiency (23.38 – 48.30%). Specific energy consumption and energy loss varied 4.93 to 9.11 MJ/kg water and 5.04 to 8.89 MJ/kg water, respectively. Approximately 8.94 to 20.07% of the total energy input is consumed by increasing of the product temperature. The values of improvement potential changed between 1.31- 5.35 MJ/kg water. Bulk density, degree of shrinkage and rehydration ratio varied from 726.6 to 762.8 kg/m3, 0.888 to 0.910, and 0.618 – 0.799, respectively. Parameters total color change (14.68 - 19. 89) and hue angle (88.07 to 91.73º) increased with increasing microwave power. Effective diffusivity and mass transfer coefficient varied from 1.99×10−9 to 12.25×10−9 m2/s and 2.71×10−6 to 19.98×10−6 m/s, respectively. The activation energy was found to be 4.98 W/g for a diffusion model and 5.33 W/g for a mass transfer model. Among the models, the Page model was found to best describe the drying behavior of soybean. Keywords: Soybean, Quality; Energy consumption
