The air temperature modulation impact on the drying of soybeans in a fixed bed

This work aimed to explore an alternative to reduce costs in the soybean drying process using a periodic drying operation, which can enhance mass and energy transfer, leading to lower energy consumption in comparison with the conventional operation carried out with entrance drying air in steady-state conditions. A fixed bed dryer for laboratory scale was used to dry soybean grains and experiments were carried out, applying the periodic and conventional operations with the same drying time and energy consumption. Results indicated with 5% of significance that the experiments conducted with entrance air temperature modulation achieved higher levels of the percentage of evaporated water improving the dryer performance. These results were in agreement with predicted data obtained with heterogeneous models and they indicated that the periodic drying operation can demand less energy to achieve a specific safe level of soybean moisture content for storage.