CFD investigation of a combined biomass furnace and solar drying system for paver blocks

Abstract

Abstract Paver blocks have been widely used as concrete materials for exterior flooring. The process of producing paver blocks consumes a lot of time as the drying period takes at least eleven days. This paper had aimed to design a drying mechanism, a combined biomass furnace and solar collector drying system for paver blocks. and simulate the flow of the system through computational fluid dynamic analysis using SolidWorks Flow Simulation (SWFS) 2018. Desired results had been achieved as temperature, pressure, and velocity fields generated by simulation were accounted to observe fluid distribution in the drying system using contour plots. The temperature in the chamber had increased and uniformly distributed as the heat inputs from the two heat sources converged in the drying chamber. It was observed that the pressure varied from 101,331.72 Pa to 101,327.83 Pa with the highest temperature peaking at 600K and velocity was 1.5 m/s. The theoretical heat produced in the solar collector, biomass furnace and combine system were 191.70 W, 1290.66 W and 1482.36 W, respectively.