Statistical dynamic features of sludge drying systems

The drying of sludge has become an important procedure for sludge disposal. Although many studies on the drying of sludge have been carried out recently, little attention was paid to the internal dynamics of dried sludge, which largely influenced phenomenal drying process. This paper proposed a statistical dynamic framework to analyze the physical mechanisms of sludge drying process. Based on the new method, the fractal dimension of a drying structure was derived analytically and its relationship with some controlling factors was analyzed. Experiments were performed to validate the theoretical analyses and good agreement was found. Not only provides a reasonable mechanistic description of internal structures of drying sludge, this work is of help to many industrial applications.