Drying of Ceramic Bricks: Thermal and Mass Analysis via CFD

Several studies about drying of ceramic materials have been developed in many engineering and fabrication sectors. This process requires high investments and high energy consumption, resulting in high costs to the companies of this sector. In many situations, it is common the use of theoretical solutions that allow, with relative ease and low cost, to change the operational and geometrical conditions of the dryer or object of drying, to obtain the optimized operational conditions. In this sense, this work aims to predict the drying process of a ceramic brick in an oven using the computational fluid dynamics analysis. For a drying temperature of 80°C, the results of the drying and heating kinetics, and the moisture content and temperature distributions of the product and the air and the air velocity and pressure in the oven are shown and analyzed. A comparison between the predicted and experimental data of the average moisture content and temperature of the brick along the process was done and a good agreement was obtained.