Estudio numérico y experimental de caudales óptimos para secado de grano de cacao.

Abstract

The main aim of this dissertation is to study numerically and experimentally the air flow for an optimum cocoa bean´s drying process. In order to achieve this objective, the geometry of a wind tunnel available at the EPN has been taken as model of the artificial drying system as well as the geometry of the cocoa beans to be used like the volume of control. For the numerical analysis, it was used OpenFOAM where the tools of relevance were: snappyHexMesh allows the generation of the internal mesh of the fluid, SimpleFoam solver for incompressible fluids. Gnuplot and ParaView use to treat the results and obtain values of Cp, vorticity and residuals. As result of this analysis, it was possible to develop the simulation. Experimentally, it was necessary to build a device which help to collect the information and converting it into a PC language to get the values of Cp for the different conditions involved in this experiment. Finally, the validation between numerical and experimental data was done using the velocity profiles and vorticities analysis giving as result a range of dimensionless flow in which the cocoa beans achieve characteristics such as: no drag and homogenous air supply.