ABSTRACT
Conveyor-belt dryers consist of a moving belt, usually made from metal or plastics, on which the material to be dried is deposited, forming a packed bed. The moving material is then subjected to heat due to which the volatile components, for example water or some solvents, evaporate and a solid layer remains, for example in the form of a solid cake. Conveyor-belt dryers are usually convective dryers with the gas flow in co- or counter-current direction, or in cross-flow with the gas passing the belt and the moving packed bed. Process control in the sense of open-loop control has been studied and published in several papers for optimal operation of conveyor-belt drying. C. T. Kiranoudis and Z. B. Markatos applied Pareto optimisation to the optimal design and operation of a conveyor-belt dryer. The purpose of Pareto optimisation is to obtain in some sense an operational optimum, specifically by minimisation or maximisation of a multi-objective cost functional.
