One-dimensional numerical solution of the diffusion equation to describe wood drying: comparison with two- and three-dimensional solutions

This article describes drying of wood cut into parallelepiped shaped pieces. A one-dimensional numerical solution of the diffusion equation with boundary condition of the third kind was proposed to describe the process. The lumber was cut into the following dimensions: thickness T = 36 mm, height H = 100 mm and length L = 745 mm. The convective drying experiment was carried out with forced air at temperature of 40 degrees C, relative humidity of 40 % and velocity of 3 m s(-1). An optimizer was coupled with the proposed numerical solution to determine the process parameters. Comparison of the results obtained in this article (one-dimensional) with results from the literature (two-and three-dimensional) indicated good agreement between the process parameters (and also simulations). However, the optimization time for one-dimensional model is about 15 times less than the optimization time for the two-dimensional case.