NUMERICAL SOLUTION FOR DETERMINING THE TEMPERATURE AND MOISTURE DISTRIBUTIONS OF RECTANGULAR, CYLINDRICAL, AND SPHERICAL OBJECTS DURING DRYING

A simultaneous heat and mass transfer model for convective drying of moist food materials has been developed. Cartesian, cylindrical, and spherical coordinate systems are taken for the analysis, as food materials dried in industries are of different shapes. The governing transient partial differential equations describing heat and mass transfer are discretized, using the fi nite difference method, and sets of algebraic equations are obtained. The diffusion coeffi cient is a temperature function, and, therefore, the heat and moisture transfer equations are solved simultaneously. A MATLAB computer code is developed to solve them. Transient temperature and moisture profi les during convective drying are estimated. The present results are compared with the existing experimental data, and it is observed that there is good agreement.
   
Author:  G. Arunsandeep and V. P. Chandramohan
Keywords:  convective drying, temperature and moisture distributions, fi nite difference method, diffusion coeffi cient, partial differential equations
Page:  895