The Prediction of Drying Uniformity in Dryer Chamber System Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

Technical University of Varna, Dept. of Thermal Engineering, 9000 Varna, Bulgaria

^* Corresponding author: chakyrova_d@tu-varna.bg

Abstract

The Dryer Chamber System is the most commonly used one because of its simple and economical design. The present article reviews the process of drying a heat insulation material, manufactured in a flat form with various thicknesses. The flat material is arranged on pallets with a distance between each other. The disadvantage of this Dryer Chamber System is the non-uniformity in the moisture distribution in the final product due to the poor organization of the airflow in the dryer chamber. The goal of this study is to analyze the conditions for improving the uniformity of drying in the currently existing Dryer Chamber System for heat insulation materials. The factors influencing the uniformity of the humidity of the material at the outlet of the dryer are studied: the way the air moves around the material and the distribution of its speed as well as the method of its supply. The influence of the situation of the material in the drying chamber on these factors was studied. The method of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to determine the velocity distribution. As a result of the numerical simulation, a scheme for organizing the space of the drying chamber has been proposed, with which to improve the distribution of the speed field. An experiment was performed to verify the results of the simulations. The performed analyzes show that the proposed scheme for improving the organization of the air movement in the drying chamber leads to the improvement of the uniformity of drying of the material.