Sensitivity analysis pertaining to effective parameters on electrohydrodynamic drying of porous shrinkable materials

Abstract

A phenomenological computational fluid dynamics model was developed to simulate drying process of a porous body using electric field corona discharge. The set of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations were solved simultaneously and compared with the experimental findings in the literature. The relative error of the corona wind velocity compared to the experiments was less than 1%. The main gradients of the EHD volume force and corona wind were close to the discharge electrode. Moreover, for no inlet air, the corona wind velocity and field distribution indicated the existence of vortices as the main factor for enhancing mass transfer during the drying process. At a constant air velocity, increase in the voltage caused increasing the corona velocity. In addition, by increasing the air velocity to some extent, the corona velocity first increased and then started to drop. As a result, for any voltage and electrode distance from the surface, an optimum air velocity could be determined. Due to the sweep impact of the primary air flow and moving the ionized molecules to the outside, the drying rates at air velocity of 1 m s⁻¹ were higher than those for air velocity of 1.5 m s⁻¹. Applying an intake air flow also altered the optimal electrode velocity from the surface due to the occurred change in the corona discharge. Therefore, is concluded that the severity of mass humidity changes is affected by the applied voltage, electrode distances from the surface, temperature, and the intake air velocity.

Keywords:

• Computational fluid dynamics
• corona wind
• high electric field
• mass transfer
• mathematical modeling
• sensitivity analysis

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Isfahan University of Technology which is gratefully acknowledged.