Discrete Element Method-Based Hybrid Compartment Model of a Rotary Dryer for Fertilizer Production

Abstract

[EN] This work introduces a compartment model based on a discreteelement method (DEM) model. The DEM model determines the residence times(RTs) of particles in the active (in contact with air) and passive zones. Theextracted RT is combined with the heat and mass transfer models into acompartment model, where particles are modeled by employing a populationbalance. Heat and mass transfer models contain efficiency coefficients that aremodeled with surrogates generated from a reduced set of experiments. Theresulting surrogate models are validated with additional experiments in anindustrial facility. It accurately reproduces the heat and mass transfer in the dryer(±10% of relative error in temperature prediction) and provides a guess of thedistribution of the properties of the particles (e.g., moisture content andtemperature) across particle sizes and locations within the dryer.