苜蓿气体射流冲击联合常温通风干燥装备设计及试验

针对苜蓿干燥存在的处理量小、耗能高、叶片损失率高的问题,该文将紫花苜蓿的干燥过程分为高温和常温两个干燥段,设计了气体射流冲击联合常温通风干燥装备,包括基于狭缝型气体射流冲击管的气体射流冲带式干燥机和基于环境条件自动控制的常温通风箱式干燥机。利用计算流体动力学软件Fluent对狭缝型气流冲击管内部的流场进行数值模拟。结果显示增设扰流板可以改善狭缝型气体射流冲击管喷嘴出口气流速度分布的均匀性,速度变异系数由不设扰流板情况下的51.1%降为7.7%;利用单片机控制系统进行信息采集并控制通风的进行,解决夜间物料吸湿回潮、发热的问题。以紫花苜蓿作为原料对干燥装备的性能进行试验验证,结果表明:气体射流冲击联合常温通风干燥的苜蓿具有批次处理量大(150 kg/h)、叶片损失率小(干草的叶片损失率为1.5%)、能耗低(单位去水能耗3 408 k J/kg)的优点。研究结果为低能耗、低叶片损失率的苜蓿干燥技术与装备提供参考。

Design and experiment of air-impingement jet combined with normal temperature ventilation dryer for alfalfa

In order to solve the problems of alfalfa drying, such as smaller drying capacity, high energy consumption, and high leaf loss rate, an alfalfa dryer based on air-impingement jet and normal temperature ventilation was designed in current work. The alfalfa drying process was divided into 2 parts: high-temperature drying in air-impingement jet belt dryer based on the slit type air-impingement tube to improve the drying speed, and then drying at room temperature in the normal temperature ventilation apparatus to save energy. The slit type air-impingement tube is the main structure of air-impingement jet belt dryer. Flow field in slit type air-impingement tube was simulated using Fluent 14.0 CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software. The spoiler was added in this tube to improve the airflow uniformity of slit type nozzle exit. The location and height of spoiler are important influence factors of airflow uniformity. The structure of slit type air-impingement tube was optimized with the method of numerical simulation for flow field in which the spoiler had different parameters. The optimal parameter of spoiler was obtained, which then offered an optimum model that the variance coefficient of flow velocity was 7.7% through the 0.1-1.0 m section of nozzle exit. In order to collect information and realize automatic control, a single chip microcomputer system was designed for the room temperature ventilation apparatus. The PT100 and SHT11 sensors were used in the automatic control system to monitor the temperature and relative humidity of environment and grass. PIC16F1947 was used as the main control chip to control and dispose the information and control fan operation so as to solve the problem of moisture reabsorbtion of alfalfa in low temperature and high relative humidity environment. Alfalfa was adopted to test the performance of the normal temperature ventilation equipment combined with air-impingement jet. One group of experiment was that air-impingement jet belt dryer was used to dry alfalfa in different temperature and material thickness to the moisture content of about 45%-50%, and after that the material was dried at room temperature in the ventilation apparatus to the final moisture content of about 15%. It was observed that the moisture content of alfalfa with the thickness of 6 cm was reduced from 78.3%to 45% after 5 min drying. It can be concluded that air-impingement jet belt dryer has the ability of rapid drying for alfalfa even in high thickness. Additionally, the temperature of alfalfa was below 65 ℃ in the process of drying, which was beneficial to save thermal sensitive nutritions of alfalfa. The room temperature ventilation apparatus based on automation control could extensively reduce energy consumption of alfalfa drying. It can be concluded that the normal temperature ventilation dyer combined with hot air-impingement jet has the advantages of low-energy consumption and low leaf loss rate, as the leaf loss rate is less than 1.5%, and the energy consumption per kilogram moisture removal is 3408 kJ which is reduced by 53%compared with hot air drying. This paper exhibits a designed new equipment for alfalfa drying, the normal temperature ventilation dryer combined with air-impingement jet, which is very important to solve the problems of high energy consumption and high leaf loss rate of the current alfalfa drying equipment.