Design and operation of convective industrial dryers
- National Technical Univ., Athens (Greece). Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Design and operational performance of convective industrial dryers are an important field of chemical engineering, which is still governed by empiricism.s This article addresses the design vs. operation problem for three basic types of continuous convective industrial dryers: conveyor-belt, fluidized bed, and rotary. Design procedures determined the optimal construction and operational characteristics in terms of total annual cost for each type involved and for a given production capacity through appropriate mathematical modeling. All dryer types were compared by evaluating optimum configurations for a wide range of product characteristics and production capacity values. Once the dryer configuration was specified, its operational performance was evaluated by comparing the optimum operation cost vs. production capacity for predefined optimum designed structures. Rotary dryers were more expensive to design than fluidized bed dryers. Operationally, however, it is the other way around due to the favored heat transfer achieved in rotary dryers. Conveyor-belt dryers lie somewhere between producing satisfactory results in terms of both design and operation. Case studies on foods and inorganics are included to demonstrate the performance of each process as well as the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
- OSTI ID:
- 404588
- Journal Information:
- AIChE Journal, Vol. 42, Issue 11; Other Information: PBD: Nov 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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