Abstract
This paper focuses on indirect biomass drying. It compares the operating characteristics of a laboratory-scale drum dryer and a pilot-scale rotary dryer. Before the design of an industrial dryer for a specific material, it is important to experimentally prove the process and to determine the drying characteristics of the material. To verify the portability of experimental results for indirect dryers, a drum dryer with indirect electric heating in a laboratory scale was designed and built to test and study the process of indirect drying. Based on the results obtained on a small-scale device, a prototype of a pilot steam-heated rotary dryer was designed and manufactured. A broad range of experiments with green wood chips and wet bark from open-air storage with moisture contents of 50 to 65 wt % were carried out on both dryers. The drying curves indicating the process, the square and volumetric evaporation capacities, and the drying energy consumption were obtained and compared, and the feasibility of indirect drying for these tested types of biomass was confirmed.
Highlights
Drying is a frequently used process for treating many different types of materials before their further use or final consumption
Since the evaporation capacity is dependent on the actual water content, all the values are evaluated for drying between 30% and 50% of the material water content as the mean value for this interval, which is in respect to a stable state of the drying process
The transferability of the experimentally obtained values of the evaporation capacity from a small indirect drum dryer to a larger unit has been investigated. This confirmed that it is preferable to use a square evaporation capacity for the design of indirect dryers, as the volume evaporation capacity better describes the operation of direct dryers
Summary
Drying is a frequently used process for treating many different types of materials before their further use or final consumption. There is the possibility of heat recovery from the latent heat of the evaporated water vapor, which is not polluted by the drying medium and possesses a temperature close in the vicinity of 100 ◦C in atmospheric conditions [7,8]. This heat may be utilized for a further increase in the total efficiency of the system of integrated indirect drying or utilized for external consumption [8]. This paper focuses on the comparison of operating characteristics of indirect dryers in two configurations: a laboratory-scale drum dryer and a pilot rotary dryer
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