Heat consumption and modeling of corn seeds intermittent drying

Abstract

Background

Corn seed is produced on a large scale, and as production is carried out seasonally, the storage is needed to supply uninterrupted demand. To carry out the storage, as the material from the harvest has a high initial moisture content, it is necessary to carry out the drying process. In order to reduce energy consumption, an alternative is intermittent drying. The purpose of this article is to fit the mathematical model of intermittent drying by distributed parameters, based on experimental data of temperature and moisture content of corn seeds submitted to intermittent drying, to determine the diffusivity value and to assess heat consumption.

Results

For samples dried to the final moisture content of 16.0% on dry basis (d.b.), the condition of intermittent drying at a temperature of 40°C and 10 min of tempering period led to the lowest heat consumption, in comparison to conventional drying and to intermittent drying under higher temperatures. In addition, to obtain a final moisture content of 14.0% (d.b.), the conventional drying condition at 55°C resulted in the lowest heat consumption, compared to the other drying conditions. The distributed parameter model can predict the experimental data with a global deviation lower than 10.0%.

Conclusion

Analyzing the moisture distribution profiles for the corn seeds, it was verified that there was a difference in the moisture content along the position inside the material, being necessary to evaluate the influence of moisture distribution along the position inside the material in kinetic drying models.