NUMERICAL APPROACH FOR PREDICTION OF AIRFLOW BEHAVIOR IN COFFEE BEAN MONOLAYERS DURING DRYING PROCESS

ABSTRACT

The homogeneity and efficiency of moisture removal from coffee beans depend on the airflow patterns inside the drying chambers used for drying. This study aimed to implement a porous medium model to simulate the airflow through mesh trays containing parchment and ripe fruit coffee ( Coffea arabica L.) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The geometry of the ripe fruit and parchment coffee beans was simplified as spherical and semi-ellipsoidal, respectively. The pressure drop in the normal direction to the monolayer was calculated as the average pressure of the normal planes located 1 mm before and after the bean layer for different air velocities. The viscous and inertial terms were adjusted by nonlinear regression for each case and incorporated into the Navier–Stokes equations as subdomains. The pressure drops calculated by the porous medium model and those calculated using the bean layers presented a good fit. The modeling of the trays as porous media can help reduce the computational resources required for CFD simulations while maintaining an acceptable accuracy.

KEYWORDS
coffee quality; porous medium; pressure drop; renewable energy; optimization; CFD