Monitoring and control of fluid-bed drying of tea

Abstract Tea processing requires new technology for improving quality management and process control. A data logging system was developed to monitor and control tea processing lines. The quality of the manual control of the drying operation is limited because of the time taken to reach stability. A model for fluidized-bed tea drying is used for the development of a new control strategy. The fluidization requirements and the drying kinetics for this model are established in experimental studies. The model is simulated in MATLAB and allows various control strategies to be studied before being implemented in practice.