Drying science and technology R&D has been charging ahead at an accelerated pace over the last three decades, driven by energy, environmental concerns as well as sustainability issues. This is reflected by the rising manuscript flow this journal has been experiencing as well as the number of successful international conferences devoted to thermal drying in various parts of the world. It is noteworthy that about one-fifth of recent archival literature on drying and related themes is attributed to international cooperation. Despite the recent dip in energy costs, drying research remains an area of significant interest. The recent trend toward multidisciplinary research and international authorship of publications has also incentivized research in thermal dehydration.
It is interesting to note that despite the numerous innovative ideas, which have appeared over the past four decades since the start of the IDS conference series, their adoption in industrial practice remains at a low level. It is well known that industry and businesses in general are more likely to take up incremental evolutionary ideas rather than radical revolutionary ideas for several reasons. One major deterrent is the potential risk, especially in the absence of highly reliable scale-up from laboratory-scale results or even pilot-scale results. The multi and interdisciplinary fields of drying are highly nonlinear processes, which make reliable modeling of the transport phenomena and materials science aspects especially difficult to model for scale-up. Advances in modeling, possibly applying techniques of artificial intelligence, will help reduce the risk involved in adopting innovative designs. I believe that in not too distant future, we will have more smart dryers, which take advantage of advances in sensing technology as well as control systems and big data.
Since academia do not design or operate dryers of large scale, nor is funding for such activity available, it is necessary for industry to join hands tangibly with interested academia to develop novel design concepts from laboratory to pilot to full scale. The time scale for academic research often is much larger than the time scale of development and design for industry. The need to publish results derived from academic research is often an obstacle in university–industry interaction due to issues related to intellectual property rights. I believe nevertheless that these are manageable problems.
From personal experience, I do think there is still strong resistance from industry to inject financial support for academic projects for some or all of the difficulties noted above. However, progress in developing innovative sustainable solutions to industrial drying problems can only come from coupling industry and academia on not only a national level but an international level. Energy efficiency and the need to mitigate impact on the environment are truly global issues that transcend national boundaries. Combining scarce financial resources with diverse talent in a global network should be a cost-effective solution to arrive at innovative designs of drying systems applicable around the world. For sustainability inclusion of renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, etc.) into drying system, design will be essential.
I hope that international conference series such as IDS, EuroDrying, ADC provide valuable global platforms to launch new cooperative R&D networks and thus effectively constitute an opportunity for industry to crowdsource for new ideas to collaborate on. I look forward to seeing greater participation by industry in upcoming conferences devoted to drying technology.
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