A study on the uniformity of hot air drying quality for stacked flake materials based on multi-physical coupling fields

Abstract

To improve the uniformity of the hot air drying quality for stacked flake materials, a heat and mass transfer study of stacked flake materials drying process based on multi-physical field coupling is carried out. A numerical simulation model of the stacked flake materials is developed based on the multi-physical field coupling theory, and the accuracy of the numerical simulation model is verified by the bidirectional alternating hot air drying test bed. The segmented hot air drying method is used to analyze the influence mechanism of single airflow direction and alternate airflow direction on the heat and mass transfer for stacked flake materials, and the optimization of drying parameters is studied. The results indicate that a single airflow direction may cause excessive drying, and the uneven stacking density significantly affects the drying quality. The increase of air flow direction change number will lead to the improvement of drying uniformity and moisture content of drying results, and at the same time, the flake material absorbs moisture significantly after changing the air flow direction. By adopting the down-down-up-up airflow direction and optimizing the parameters, the moisture content uniformity of the drying results is improved by 19%, while energy consumption is reduced.

Keywords:

• Multi-physical coupling fields
• heat and mass transfer
• stacked flake materials
• segmented drying
• bidirectional alternating hot air drying
• drying quality uniformity

Disclosure of interest statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Major Science and Technology Special Project of Yunnan Province of China, grant number 202002AD080001.