Secagem convectiva de sólidos com forma complexa usando o método integral baseado em Galerkin.

Abstract

Several authors has studied the phenomenon of heat and mass transfer during the drying process. Numerous mathematical models have been proposed to describe the heating of solid and moisture loss during drying, however worth pointing out that few studies incorporate the phenomena of simultaneous heat and mass transport applied to ellipsoidal solids. Thus, this study aims to simulate the drying of solids with complex shape. An analytical solution of the diffusion equation to describe the transient process, based on the, theory of liquid diffusion, using the Galerkin-based integral method considering convective boundary conditions and constant thermophysical properties is presented. Application of the methodology has been done to describe drying the wheat grain. Results of the moisture content and temperature of the wheat grain during drying are presented and compared with the literature and a good agreement was verified. The results are consistent and the model presented here can be used to solve problems of simultaneous heat and mass transfer in agricultural products with prolate spheroidal geometry such as wheat. It was observed that, on the drying process, the mass loss of solid is smaller than the heating, one since heat thermal conductivity of is higher than the mass diffusivity.