STUDY OF VELOCITY AND TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION INSIDE THE FRUIT DRYER USING CFD

Abstract

Drying is one of the most commonly used methods of preservation and processing of fruits and berries. All variety of foods and fruits in our day to day life needs some way of preservation mainly to reduce or stop spoilage, to make the dried fruits available throughout a year, to maintain desired levels of nutritional properties for the longest possible time span and to make value added products. Tray dryer is the most extensively used because of its simple and economic design. The main drawback of tray dryer is the non-uniformity of the final moisture content of the product. Good air flow distribution throughout the drying chamber can improve the drying uniformity. The models are designed in solid edge and the computational fluid dynamic analysis is done using ANSYS fluent software. CFD is considered an integral part of engineering design and analysis because of its capability to solve energy using numerical methods to predict the velocity and temperature in the drying chamber