Modelling local heat and mass transfer in food slabs due to air jet impingement

Adequate design and verification of drying by a forced convection enhanced technique (gaseous jet impingement) can be carried out by numerical analysis, but customary transport calculations need to be integrated to account for complex (simultaneous) energy and mass transfer. In this paper the available procedures are reviewed and applied to food substrates: temperature, mass concentration and velocity fields are computed even for non-linear couplings (i.e. when local species concentration depends on temperature) using a specific solution strategy. Validity and limitations of the adopted notation and related integration into a proprietary software are discussed. A comparison is also brought forth with the available literature data. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.