Comparative study of phosphate solar drying processes

Abstract

Drying phosphate plays an important step in its production. Different technologies are used in the objective of improving drying efficiency. One of this amelioration is the research of new heating sources. In the present work, we are interested in using solar energy in the heater unit of the phosphate drying. Our work is a comparative study between the impacts of the using three different heaters technologies, the flat plate collector, the concentrator and the multi-concentrator. A numerical study is conducted to formulate a numerical model from balance energy on different locations on heaters technologies. Besides, mass and energy balance on phosphate particle is defined to complete our model. The simulation on MATLAB, for the operating conditions of the city of Gafsa in Tunisia, shows that the technology of multi-concentrator is the best for the air heating. Its temperature achieves 220°C. In addition, it allows the reduction of the phosphate humidity from 18% to 4%.

KEYWORDS:

• Drying of phosphate
• solar energy
• air flat plate collector
• solar concentrator
• solar multi-concentrator
• moisture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.