Airborne power ultrasound for paper drying: an experimental study

Abstract

A novel approach for paper drying using airborne ultrasound technology is presented. A unique experimental setup is developed, and a systematic study is conducted using 2³ factorial design of experiments and Analysis of Variance. Three controlling factors are considered in the experiments including the initial moisture content, basis weight and refining condition. The outcome of the experiments is compared to a previous work on direct-contact ultrasonic drying of paper. The results confirm that similar to direct-contact, for airborne ultrasonic drying, the basis weight/thickness of the sample is the most important factor in ultrasonic drying and it is followed by the effect of initial moisture content. Using linear regression model, a correlation for predicting the total time of ultrasonic drying is provided. Quality of the dried samples is evaluated, and the permeability measurements confirmed the effect of pore characteristics on ultrasonic drying. The analysis for energy consumption reveals that airborne ultrasonic drying is more efficient at higher moisture contents.

Keywords:

• Airborne ultrasonic drying
• non-contact ultrasonic drying
• paper drying
• energy analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Advanced Manufacturing under Award Number DE-EE0009125, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), and the Center for Advanced Research in Drying (CARD), a US National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. CARD is located at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (co-site). The pulps used in this study were provided by Domtar and the authors appreciate this.