A Numerical Approach To Drying Process Of Hygroscopic Polymeric Granulates With Different Drying Configurations And Parameter Comparison

摘要

Some polymers tend to possess affinity with water and eventually, absorb significant moisture content from the surrounding air, causing difficulties during their industrial processing. Drying of these hygroscopic polymers, therefore, plays a vital role in their usability in industrial applications. In this work, the drying kinetics of the polymeric granulates is numerically formulated and the influence of different parameters pertaining to the drying procedure has been investigated. Backward Euler or implicit algorithm has been considered for solving the second order partial differential heat and mass transfer equations for simulating the drying kinetics of Polyamide 6 (PA-6). At first, the conduction of heat from the granulate surface towards the core was formulated using one dimensional transient heat conduction law and corresponding diffusion coefficients were determined using Arrhenius diffusion model. Afterwards, the migration of moisture from the granulate core towards the surface has been calculated using Fick's second law of diffusion. The data obtained from the single polymer granulate was then used to calculate the amount of moisture removed and the drying rate. The numerical results showed similitude with the experimental data obtained from the literature, although deviated quantitatively. To investigate the influence of different parameters on the drying process, different cases with varying drying air temperature, granulate radius and initial moisture content were compared. The numerical analysis qualitatively predicted all the dependencies to be expected. With higher drying air temperature, drying rate was observed to be faster and with higher granulate radius, drying rate was slower. With better approximations of the applied parameters and algorithms, the accuracy of the developed numerical model could be improved and used as a prediction tool for the drying process of polymer samples with reasonable tolerance.