A Model of Drying Kinetics of Acacia mangium Wood at Different Temperatures

The objective of this study was to determine the isothermal drying kinetics of Acacia mangium wood blocks by employing a relative humidity-controlled drying chamber. A model was developed based on solution of Fick's second law and evaluated through the coefficient of determination (R-2), sum of square error (SSE), root mean square error (RMSE), and reduced chi-square ((2)). This model was compared to semi-theoretical models which are commonly used to describe the drying behavior of biomass in previous studies. The porosity and shrinkage characteristics of dried specimens were also evaluated. Based on the findings in this work, it was determined that the proposed model resulted in an excellent fit with experimental data for all four drying temperature levels of 30, 35, 40, and 45 degrees C to describe the isothermal drying kinetics of Acacia mangium. It appears that volumetric shrinkage of the samples decreased quadratically with decreasing moisture ratio. The activation energy of the drying process was determined to be 41.07kJ/mol.