Design a cabinet dryer with two geometric configurations using CFD

Cabinet dryers are the most popular devices for fruit drying. One of the drawback of this dryer can be non-uniformity in the desired end product moisture content. To surmount this problem, a new version of cabinet dryer with separate entrances for the trays was designed in this research. Some involving physical properties of fruit such as air flow resistance, kernel and bulk densities and porosity were measured. Several different three dimensional geometries of cabinet dryer with three fruit holding trays were studied theoretically using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique. The most appropriate geometrical sketch with acceptable uniform air flow and temperature distribution in the cabinet dryer was selected and fabricated. Several experiments were conducted on the new pilot size dryer Lemon fruit with initial moisture content of 84 % (wb) was selected to be dried in the new dryer. The experimental results showed that the new cabinet dryer illustrated an even distribution of air velocity and temperature throughout the dryer. Comparing the experimental and predicted (extracted for the CFD analysis) data under different operating conditions ( air velocities of 1, 2 and 3 ms−1, initial product moisture content of 84 %(wb) and drying air temperature of 50 ◦C) revealed a very good correlation coefficient of 0.99 for air velocity in the drying chamber. In the next step, the new cabinet dryer was compared with the existing design Amanlou and Zomorodian (J Food Eng 101: 8–15, 2011) with air flow distribution uniformity among the trays, rate of drying in different trays, and electrical energy consumptions, It was revealed that the new design was superior to the existing design in all of these aspects.

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