STUDY OF THE APPLICATION OF A NUMERICAL MODEL OF SIMULATION OF THE DRYING PROCESS FOR DIMENSIONING OF ROTARY DRYERS

The drying has a fundamental part in most areas of the industry in the world. Perhaps one of the most common and older industrial operations, however still not completely understood. The calculation and dimensioning methods of dryers, specially rotary dryers, are very old and has being transformed very slowly. Initially they were basically experimental models and with the technological advances, they had in such a way started to be as empirical as experimental methods. Actually there isn't a single theory or project methodology in open literature or any manual that can be used for the description of the drying process. Due to extensive application of the techniques of drying and its importance in different manufacture processes, many theoretical and experimental studies on drying techniques, effect of the involved parameters and on mathematical and numerical models for simulation of the drying process has been carried through and published. Such mathematical models can in such a way be used for dimensioning as much as the forecast of variations of the final product as a function of the variation of the inlet process parameters, and, because of its singularities, those methods return results of very distinct precision. The present work studied the application of a simplified model of simulation of rotary dryers, developed and published in another work (Soares et. al., 2004), for the dimensioning of these type of dryers, comparing its results with the ones of other described models in literature, from real cases of the sugar industry.