Conjugate heat and mass transfer modeling of a new rubber smoking room and experimental validation

A new rubber smoking room has been designed, constructed and tested for natural rubber sheet smoke drying for better air temperature and flow distributions. Three-dimensional numerical model of rubber sheet drying using a conjugate approach is investigated by a computational fluid dynamics simulation. The optimal 2.5 m × 6.0 m × 3.5 m rubber smoking room contains 40 63.5 mm diameter hot gas supply ducts on the floor and four 0.2 m × 0.2 m and one 0.5 m × 0.5 m ventilating lids on the roof. Velocity and temperature of the drying air, and temperature and moisture content of rubber sheets have been predicted. The experimental and simulation results are in good agreement in terms of statistical parameters. R2 for temperature and moisture content are 0.980-0.987 and 0.972, respectively, while RMSE are 5.73-6.99 and 2.20. The drying time is significantly reduced from 72 h in a conventional natural-flow smoking room to 48 h in this new design room.