Inverse Approaches to Drying of Thin Bodies With Significant Shrinkage Effects

This paper deals with the application of inverse concepts to the drying of bodies that undergo changes in their dimensions. Simultaneous estimation is performed of moisture diffusivity, together with the thermal conductivity, heat capacity, density, and phase conversion factor of a drying body, as well as the heat and mass transfer coefficients and the relative humidity of drying air. This was accomplished by using only temperature measurements. A mathematical model of the drying process of shrinking bodies has been developed where the moisture content and temperature fields in the drying body are expressed by a system of two coupled partial differential equations. The shrinkage effect was incorporated through the experimentally obtained changes of the specific volume of the drying body in an experimental convective dryer. The proposed method was applied to the process of drying potatoes. For the estimation of the unknown parameters, the transient readings of a single temperature sensor located in the midplane of the potato slice, exposed to convective drying, have been used. The Levenberg–Marquardt method and a hybrid optimization method of minimization of the least-squares norm are used to solve the present parameter estimation problem. Analyses of the sensitivity coefficients and of the determinant of the information matrix are presented as well.