Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Mathematical Model of The Drying Process PDF
A Mathematical Model of The Drying Process PDF
3/2001
humidities of the air in the pores and the leather. In this study,
1 Introduction the rate of moisture exchange is assumed to be proportional
Among the many processes that are performed in to the relative humidity difference. Thus, the rate equation
the leather industry, convective drying has an essential role. for mass transfer is
Leather fabrication has become an important industrial deve- 1 ¶CF
lopment worldwide, similar to other technologically ad- = K ( yA - y F) . (5)
r(1 - e ) ¶t
vanced process industries. Some of the unit operations in-
volved in this industry, especially the drying process, are still Also, the relative humidities of air and leather are assumed to
based on empiricism and tradition, with very little use of sci- be
entific principles [1–4]. C RT
yA = A (6)
Many researchers have studied the drying process Ps
through a variety of mathematical models [5–10]. Beard [5] and
assumed that leather can consist of two layers, one dry and CF
one wet layer. However, his analysis did not describe the yF = . (7)
r (1 - e )
details of what was going on inside the leather. Also, he used
two experimental constants to fit his data to the experimental The rate constant in Equation 5 is an unknown empirical
results of the measured temperature variation inside the constant and the effect of this constant can be examined. The
dryer. value of the rate constant was varied from K = 0.1 to K = 10.
In this study, the mathematical model developed by The resulting calculated leather surface temperatures are
Nordon [9] has been modified to determine the transient compared in Figure 1.
temperature and moisture concentration distribution of
leather in a dryer. Also, the distributions of temperature
and moisture concentration are calculated using the fini-
te-difference method. The effects of many operating
parameters such as dryer temperature, humidity, and initial
moisture content of the leather have been examined.
Temperature [K]
2 Mathematical model
The mathematical model derived by Nordon is used with
small modifications. The resulting differential equations are
derived as
¶C ¶CF ¶CA
D A2 = + (1)
¶x ¶t ¶t
and
¶2T ¶T ¶C
k = r Cp -l F . (2)
¶x2 ¶t ¶t
Time [s]
The boundary conditions for convective heat transfer and
mass transfer at the leather surface are Fig. 1: Effect of rate constant on the leather surface temperature
q = h e (Te - T ) (3)
When the rate constant is small, the evaporation rate is so
and
small that the moisture content decreases very slowly. Initially,
m = h m (Ce - CA ) . (4) the surface temperature increases rapidly, but later this de-
The deriving force determining the rate of mass trans- clines. When K is greater than 1.0, however, the effect of the
fer inside the fabric is the difference between the relative rate constant on the surface temperature distribution is not
3 Model prediction
The temperature and moisture content were calculated
using this model. In these calculations, the parameters used
for the base condition are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Values of parameters for base condition
Time [s]
Temperature [K]
Temperature [K]
Time [s] Time [s]
Fig. 5: Effect of heat and mass transfer coefficients Fig. 7: Effect of dryer air temperature
transfer, and both heat and mass transfer coefficients were moisture content distribution of leather in the dryer with rea-
determined using this assumption. The calculated results are sonable accuracy using the model, the effect of the tempera-
compared in Figure 5. When the heat and mass transfer coef- ture and humidity of the dryer, the initial moisture content of
ficients are high, the leather temperature rise is great and the leather and the heat and mass transfer coefficients can be
time required for drying is relatively short. predicted for leather. With the model predictions, energy
The effect of drying air moisture content, and the calcu- consumption can potentially be reduced by optimizing the
lated results of the model are shown in Figure 6. When the drying conditions of the dryer.
moisture content is high, the initial temperature rise of the
leather also becomes high. This may be because the satura-
tion temperature in the initial stage largely depends on the 5 Nomenclature
drying air moisture content. After the initial temperature rise,
3
however, the temperature increase is relatively small, and thus CA moisture content of air in leather pores [kg/m ]
the time required for complete drying is comparatively long. Ce moisture content of external air [kg/m ]
3
3
CF moisture content in leather [kg/m ]
Cp specific heat [kJ/kg K]
2
D diffusion coefficient [m /s]
2
G mass flowrate [kg/m s]
Temperature [K]
2
he heat transfer coefficient [W/m K]
hm mass transfer coefficient [m/s]
K rate constant [1/s]
k thermal conductivity [W/m K]
m mass transfer rate [kg/m2 s]
Ps saturation pressure [Pa]
2
q convective heat transfer rate [W/m ]
Time [s]
R gas constant [kJ/K]
T temperature [K]
Fig. 6: Effect of drying air moisture content
Te external air temperature [K]
The effect of dryer air temperature was also investigated,
and the calculation results are shown in Figure 7. When the t time [s]
dryer air temperature is high, the temperature rise of the yA relative humidity of air in pores of leather
leather is great.
yF relative humidity of leather
4 Conclusion e porosity
The mathematical model developed in this study can l latent heat of evaporation [kJ/kg]
be used to predict transient variations in temperature and 3
r density [kg/m ]