Technical Papers and Presentations

Heat and mass transfer involved in drying is studied by using COMSOL 3.4. The effect of air temperature on the performance of the drying process applied to fresh food slices is scrutinized.

COMSOL’s flexible formulation is exploited by using special drying kinetics for the substrate, and by including a treatment of the dependence of the properties upon the residual moisture content.

The model is properly validated with the available experimental measurements. Due to its flexibility and generality, the model can be used in common industrial driers' optimization, even under the assumption of a laminar flow field.