Conjugate Analysis of Natural Convective Drying of Biological Materials

This paper presents a numerical analysis of heat and mass transport during natural convective drying of an extruded com meal plate. The conjugate problem of drying and natural convection boundary layer Is modeled. The finite volume technique was used to discretize and solve the highly nonlinear system of coupled differential equations governing the transport inside the plate. The boundary layer solution was obtained by means of a finite difference software package that utilizes Runge-Kutta's 5th order method to solve the inherent transport equations. A methodology for evaluating the heat and mass transfer coefficients during the numerical simulation was developed and successfully implemented. The results showed that there is no analogy between heat and mass transfer coefficients for this type of problem.