CFD SIMULATION OF AN INNOVATIVE VERTICAL DRYER FOR AGRICULTURAL SEEDS DRYING

Artificial drying of agricultural seeds ensures conditions for their preservation while by reducing the water content of seeds, it is possible to keep them for long periods of time, without the need of complex storage facilities. During the drying process, both moisture and a significant amount of heat are lost, resulting in high energy consumption. Recovery of lost heat from the used drying agent was achieved in an innovative model of the vertical dryer so that the energy consumption of the drying process was reduced. The development of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology and software has made it possible to design and simulate an innovative vertical dryer model with heat recovery for agricultural seed, to achieve uniform seed temperature distribution and to reduce energy consumption. CFD simulation has the advantage of testing the flow of heat agent and assessing the temperature distribution within the vertical dryer before introducing the agricultural seeds into it. The paper presents a comprehensive method of CFD simulation in the heat recovery dryer, where the mathematical models of heat transfer and the hot air flow, the distribution of the temperature of the drying agent and the temperature in the seed layer are presented simultaneously in two or three dimensions. The results obtained by the CFD simulation of the dryer have an error of +/- 5% against the experimental determinations, which is an accepted level in the heat transfer field.