Desenvolvimento de ferramentas numéricas e computacionais para a descrição de transferência de massa em corpos cilíndricos: aplicação em desidratação osmótica e secagem complementar de banana.

Abstract

This study aims to develop numerical and computational tools to describe diffusion processes in solids with cylindrical shapes. For this the diffusion equation, considering the case of an infinite cylinder and a finite cylinder, was discretized via finite volume method with a fully implicit formulation, assuming a boundary condition of the third kind. For the numerical solutions obtained by discretization, software has been developed on the Windows platform using the Fortran programming language. The solutions developed were validated by comparison with results provided by analytical solutions. The tests showed consistency in the results provided by the numerical solutions. Furthermore, in order to obtain the physical parameters of the mass transfer process, was developed an optimizer which was coupled with numerical solutions. Tests were performed with the optimizer developed in order to analyze the capacity of finding the optimal values of a mass transfer process. The tests indicated that the optimizer is able to obtain the parameters necessary for the study of this work, reaching the region containing the optimal values for the parameters, even when initial values were considered far from the optimal values. From the data obtained in banana (cut into pieces of 10 mm) osmotic dehydration experiments performed by combining temperature of 40 and 70 ° C and concentration of 40 and 60 ° Brix, optimizations were carried out to obtain expressions for describing the effective diffusivity of water and sucrose and values for convective mass transfer coefficient. The results obtained for the diffusivities of water and sucrose are in agreement with the literature. The values supplied by the optimizer for the mass convective transfer coefficient indicated a boundary condition of the first kind. Optimizations were carried out from the complementary drying data of osmotically dehydrated samples, and the results obtained for the diffusivity of water were consistent with those found in the literature. It was concluded by the optimizations that high concentrations of osmotic dehydration influenced the boundary condition of the complementary drying.