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Kumar, Chandan, Karim, Azharul, Joardder, Mohammad Uzzal Hossain,

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Modeling heat and mass transfer process during convection drying of fruit.
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Queensland University of Technology, Australia, pp. 1-8.

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 November 25-27, 2012, Gold Coast, Australia
www.ICCM-2012.org

Modeling Heat and Mass Transfer Process during Convection Drying of Fruit

C. Kumar*, A. Karim, M.U.H. Joardder,G.J. Miller

Science and Engineering Faculty
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
*Corresponding author: chandan.kumar@student.qut.edu.au

Abstract
Fruit drying is a process of removing moisture to preserve fruits by preventing microbial spoilage. It
increase shelf life, reduce weight and volume thus minimizing packing, storage, and transportation
cost and enable storage of food under ambient environment. But, it is a complex process which
involves combination of heat and mass transfer and physical property change and shrinkage of the
material. In this background, the aim of this paper to develop a mathematical model to simulate
coupled heat and mass transfer during convective drying of fruit. This model can be used predict the
temperature and moisture distribution inside the fruits during drying. Two models were developed
considering shrinkage dependent and temperature dependent moisture diffusivity and the results
were compared. The governing equations of heat and mass transfer are solved and a parametric
study has been done with Comsol Multiphysics 4.3. The predicted results were validated with
experimental data.
Keywords: Drying, Heat and mass transfer, Modeling, Comsol-Multyphysics

Introduction
Drying is one of the oldest and most cost-effective means of preservation of grains, crops and foods
of all varieties(Askari, Emam-Djomeh et al. 2006). Fruits and vegetables contain approximately
80% moisture so they are classified as highly perishable (Orsat, Yang et al. 2007). Therefore, 1.3
billion tons of food is lost annually due to lack of proper processing which is one third of global
food production(Gustavsson, Cederberg et al. 2011). Drying has a great potential in process food
industries as it is perhaps the oldest, most common and most diverse of chemical engineering and
operation for food preservation. However, drying is an energy intensive process as it usually
requires hot air as heating medium to allow simultaneous heat and mass transfer between the drying
air and material being dried. Moreover quality of food degrades during drying. A good drying
model is essential for optimization of this process for reducing energy consumption and improving
product quality. Several drying model have been proposed to describe drying kinetics. Most of them
are empirical which do not help toward optimization because they cannot able to capture the real
physics behind drying and are only applicable for specific operating conditions. The diffusion based
model can capture well the physics during drying (Chou, Chua et al. 2000; Chua, Mujumdar et al.
2003). However they are presented in terms of partial differential equations which have constant
those changes with temperature and moisture content. Most of the diffusion models consider
constant thermal conductivity, specific heat, constant diffusion coefficient and constant heat and
mass transfer coefficients although the does changes as drying process. The objective of the present
study is to develop a mathematical model considering variable material properties. Two models
were developed and compared based on temperature and shrinkage dependent effective moisture
diffusivity. The model consist of coupled heat conduction and mass diffusion equations which were
solved numerically using finite element method through the use of COMSOL Multiphysics 4.3.
The 4th International Conference on Computational Methods (ICCM2012), Gold Coast, Australia
www.ICCM-2012.org
Mathematical Model:

Problem formulation:
Figure 1 represent schematic diagram of food drying showing both transport of heat and mass. This
transport process of heat experience two different distinct occurrences: (1) an increase in food
temperature towards air temperature due to inward flux of heat and (2) a decrease in temperature
due to outward heat flux because of evaporation (Barati and Esfahani 2011)

Air Flow Energy in from air Energy, moisture convected

away

Heat flux Mass flux

FOOD

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of heat and mass transfer during drying of food material

In this study experimental data of banana cylinder drying from Karim and Hawlader (2005a) are
used to validate the model. Figure 2 shows the actual geometry and simplified 2D axisymmetric
geometry used for modeling. Due to axial symmetry only one quarter of a planer intersection was
considered for simulation.

36mm 18mm
2mm
4mm

Axis of Symmetry

(b)
(a)
Figure 2. (a) Actual geometry of the banana slice and (b) Simplified 2D axisymmetric model
domain.

In developing the model the following assumption were made:

(1) Moisture movement and heat transfer are one dimensional
(2) No chemical reaction takes place during drying.

Governing Equations:
Mass transfer equations:
Heat Transfer equation:
Initial and Boundary conditions:
Initial moisture content, kg/kg dry basis, Initial temperature

Heat transfer boundary conditions:

At open boundary:
At symmetry and other boundary:

Mass transfer boundary conditions:

At open boundary:
At symmetry and other boundaries:

Input Parameters of the model:

However the specific heat and thermal conductivity are not considered as constant, the following
equations of moisture dependent specific heat and thermal conductivity of banana were used (Bart-
Plange, Addo et al. 2012).
2
C s = 0.811M w − 24.75M w + 1742 (1)

K s = 0.006M w + 0.120 (2)

The model developed for air velocity and 600C as data for this drying condition available
in graph as well as tabulated form (Karim and Hawlader 2005b).

Shrinkage and temperature dependent effective diffusivity Calculation:

Crank (1975) and Fish (1958) presented effective diffusion coefficient as a function of moisture
content for product undergoing shrinkage during drying. In this study the following equation were
used to incorporate shrinkage dependent diffusivity.
Dref  b0  2
=  (3)
Deff  b 

Thickness ratio obtained by the following equation

 ρ + M wρs 
b = b0  w  (4)
 ρw + M 0 ρs 
Temperature dependent diffusivity was obtained from Arrhenius type relationship with the
temperature with the following equation.

Heat and mass transfer coefficient calculation:

Average heat transfer coefficient is calculated from the following equation (Mills 1995) for laminar
and turbulent flow respectively:
As Fourier’s law and Fick’s law are identical in mathematical form the analogy is used to find mass
transfer coefficient. Nusselt number and Prandtle number is replaced by Sherwood number and
Schmidt number respectively as following relationship:

Where , and

Results and discussion:

The temperature evolution of the material is shown in Figure 3 for drying air temperature 600C and
velocity 0.5m/s. It is evident that the predicted temperatures for both model agreed reasonably well
with those experimental data.

Figure 3. Temperature profile obtained for experimental and simulation with shrinkage and
temperature dependent diffusivity (for T=600C and V=0.5m/s)

Figure 4 represents the moisture content with drying time. It shows that temperature dependent
moisture diffusivity closely agrees with the experimental moisture content data whereas the
shrinkage dependent diffusivity initially shows faster drying rate. This is may be due to the fact that
shrinkage dependent diffusivity starts simulation with reference diffusivity and decrease with time.
So initially evaporation is too high because of higher diffusion coefficient which causes more
deviation from experimental data. So from this it could be said that to consider temperature
dependent diffusivity is better for simulation of drying. Baini and Langrish (2007) also
recommended using temperature dependent diffusivity which is also reflected from the simulation.
They reported that shrinkage reduce diffusion path length which increases diffusivity on the other
hand it reduces capillary which decrease diffusion. So shrinkage has two opposite effect on
diffusion coefficient which are likely to cancel each other.

Figure 4. Moisture profile obtained for experimental and simulation with shrinkage and
temperature dependent diffusivity (T=600C and V=0.7m/s).
Temperature and moisture distribution inside the food at any time during the drying can easily be
obtained from the simulation. For the sake of brevity, only temperature and moisture distribution at
300 minutes for temperature dependent moisture diffusivity model presented in figure 5.

(a)

(b)
Figure 5: (a) Temperature and (b) Moisture distribution inside the food after 300 minutes of
drying at T=600C and V=0.3m/s.
However from the figure 5a it is observable that the temperature gradient is not significant inside
the material because the thickness of the material is very small in the simulation. It is also clear
from figure 5 that the temperature and moisture flux are opposite in direction.

Parametric Analysis: After validation of the model it is very easy to do parametric analysis in
COMSOL Multiphysics with its parametric sweep option. The following figure 6 and 7 shows
moisture and temperature evolution for 40, 50 and 600C with air velocity 0.7m/s.

Figure 6. Moisture content for different air temperature for velocity 0.7m/s

Figure 7. Material temperature for different air temperature with air velocity 0.7m/s.
From the figure 6 it is easily concluded that the as the drying air temperature increases drying rate
increases, for example, it takes approximately 750,450 and 300 minutes to reach a moisture content
value 0.5kg/kg dry basis for drying air temperature 40, 50 and 60 0C respectively.

Conclusion:
In this work a mathematical model for heat and mass transfer during has been developed with
COMSOL Multiphysics 4.3. Moisture dependent specific heat and thermal conductivity and
temperature dependent diffusivity were considered. The model is validated against experimental
data and then a distribution of moisture and temperature distribution were presented as well as a
parametric study has been conducted.
The proposed model can easily be implemented by additional multi-physics effect such as
microwave and can readily extended to allow for full three dimensional geometries by using
COMSOL flexible features.
Nomenclature

b Half thickness Greek Letters

Moisture Concentration Density,
Specific heat, Dynamic viscosity,
Diffusivity, Dimensionless Number
Constant of Integration, Reynolds Number
Activation Energy of diffusion of water, Nusselt number
Latent heat of evaporation of water, Smidth Number
Heat transfer Coefficient, Sherwood number
Mass transfer Coefficient, Prandtl number
Thermal conductivity, Subscripts
Characteristics length a/air air
M Moisture content w Water/wet basis
Heat source or sink s Solid or material
gas constant, eff effective
Reaction rate ref Reference
Absolute temperature b Banana/bulk
Velocity of surface (m/s) 0 Initial
Velocity of air, e equilibrium

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