A HEAT PUMP MODEL FOR HEAT PUMP DRYING STUDY

Abstract

Drying is a common process in a number of industries. In practice, much of the
commercial drying plant is not energy efficient for various reasons, one of which is that
commercially available dryers are not generally equipped with heat recovery facilities. With
heat pumps, however, it is possible to recover both sensible and latent heat and La use
to best advantage the high grade energy input to the heat pump compressor.
Because of the inherent system complexity, it is important to formulate accurate
simulation models of the heat pump and of the drying process and to combine them
into a single-system model for dryer performance evaluation.
In this paper, a brief coverage is given of the development of the heat pump
model for combining with a fixed-bed drying model to form a range of heat pump
dryer configurations which may be used to study the heat pump dryer configurations of
interest. Modelling approaches, equations and computational procedures for system component
models are also described.