Moisture loss from wood products during drying - Part II: Surface moisture content distributions

This article presents a model to predict the surface moisture content distributions for wood products subjected to drying. The wood products are idealized in the modeling as either infinite plates or long cylinders. The analysis for transient moisture loss is carried out under two important conditions, namely, 0.1 < Bi < 100 and Bi > 100. The case where Bi < 0.1 is not considered, since the center and surface moisture contents may be almost the same because of negligible internal resistance to the moisture loss. The center moisture contents are estimated and compared with experiments. Results show that the method presented here is capable of determining the surface moisture contents for such wood products. The model can be used for a variety of wood-drying applications.