STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF SIMULATED WOOD DRYING SCHEDULES AS REGARDS DRYING TIME REDUCTION IN AN EXPERIMENTAL KILN

A new configuration of an experimental drying kiln requires tests in what regards the determination of an optimized drying schedule. To draw up the most advantageous drying schedule involves a lot of experimental effort. In order to reduce this effort we have proposed in this paper a statistical method that we have employed to analyze a number of 64 combinations of velocity, dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity, as drying schedule input values, applied to wood drying in an experimental kiln, regarding their influence upon drying time. We used the experimental design, where the experiments were replaced by simulation. The analysis of the data consisted in testing if there are any main effects or two-factor interactions or a three-factor interaction. A conclusion of this analysis is that the low velocity values have less influence upon the drying time, but the temperature has a main effect upon it.