Study of Uniform Heating and Efficiency of Paper Mill Drying Procedures

The Paper Mill Project goal is to improve upon the uniform heating of a continuous paper sheet flowing across a heat source for the purpose of drying the paper. The project tests different porous media to achieve uniform heat distribution across the paper. Existing designs overheat the paper to overcome the uneven heat distribution caused by uneven flow velocities; current designs also achieve low overall efficiency. This project attempts to test the effect porous media has on creating even heat distributions across the paper sheet, and which type of porous media achieves the greatest overall efficiency. This project was conducted in two phases; the first phase tests the different porous medium drying a single sheet conveying at two different sheet velocities. The second phase tested the different porous medium drying four stationary strips of paper for a length of one minute.Copyright © 2011 by ASME