ABSTRACT
One of the major concerns of industrial timber drying practioners is quality of the dried boards. Quality of the final dried product is defined such that deformations which occur during drying and surface and internal cracks are minimised. In order to predict a degrade in the timber an understanding of the fundamental physics associated with drying must be gained. This can be achieved by experimental methods, however, this is an expensive and time consuming endeavour. An alternative approach is to develop a computational model which predicts the behaviour of the timber throughout the drying cycle. In order to predict possible warping of the boards a stress analysis model must be coupled to a drying model. This paper presents a Control Volume Finite Element numerical model which predicts the moisture content, temperature, pressure, displacements and stresses throughout the board. A high temperature drying case is studied with a dry bulb temperature of https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">100∘Chttps://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429077463/6187eaf5-ecd9-4c94-bd21-a5424a326d8e/content/eq968.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>. The wet bulb temperature and the airflow within the kiln are varied to study the effects on the board deformation and stress distribution.
