Applying CFD for designing a new fruit cabinet dryer

Cabinet dryers are the most popular equipment for fruit drying. One of the drawback of this dryer can be non-uniformity in the desired moisture content of end product. A new cabinet dryer with a side mounted plenum chamber was designed, constructed and evaluated. To obtain a uniform distribution of drying air flow and temperature taking into account the overall operating conditions, seven different geometries of cabinet dryer were envisaged theoretically (computational fluid dynamics (CFD) by using fluent software) and experimentally. Experiments were conducted on the most appropriate sketch with acceptable uniform air flow and temperature distribution. The experimental results showed that the new cabinet dryer illustrated an even distribution of air velocity and temperature throughout the dryer. Comparing the experimental and predicted (extracted for the CFD analysis) data revealed a very good correlation coefficient of 99.9% and 86.5% for drying air temperature and air velocity in the drying chamber, respectively.