Research Regarding the Influence of Drying Agent’s Speed and Temperature on the Work Process of Corn Dehydration

Introduction: For the proper progression of the work process for cereal drying it is necessary that thedistribution of the termic agent should be uniform and steady through the product layer, so that the variation ofthe product’s humidity and temperature could be similar in all the layer’s spots.Aims: The purpose of this paper is to obtain a uniform distribution of heat in the product along with a closevariation of its humidity on the layer’s thickness.Materials and Methods: In order to achieve those proposed, corn seeds with humidities between 16-25%were subjected successively to be dried, in three adjoining cells with a total thickness of 150 mm. To fulfill theobjective, there was an installation designed and built for dehydration of cereal seeds in laboratory conditions.By varying the speed and the temperature of the termic agent, were studied a total of 80 experimental variants.During the research, was monitored the influence of the structural and functional parameters of the installation fordehydration on the variation of humidity.Results: The results of the experimental researches highlight the conversely proportional variation of moisturein the three layers while increasing the drying agent’s speed and temperature. Values of layers humidities havevaried evenly for temperatures up to 60 oC.Conclusion: In the present research work, we demonstrated that with decreasing humidity the porosityincreases in the product layer, the drying agent speed increases, the drying agent temperature decreases, and thedrying agent humidity increases. Â