Finite difference solutions for heat transfer during drying of cubic papaya particles

Abstract

Heat transfer is one of the mostly used processes in industry. With the growth of food consumption, it is notorious the use of drying to increase the lifetime of organic products like fruits, especially through dehydration. In this work, the computational performance of a fully explicit and of the Crank-Nicolson implicit finite difference schemes is addressed to solve the heat transfer problem of simulating convective drying of cubic particles of papaya. The numerical results obtained for the temperature profile in the center of the sample are compared with experimental data performed under the following operating conditions: temperature (50, 60 e 70°C), air velocity (2 m/s) and dimensions (1x1x1, 2x2x2 e 3x3x3cm). Comparisons between the two numerical methodologies are presented for a variety of situations. Our experiments have shown that the numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental data.