Modelling heat and mass transfer in drying of biological materials: a simplified approach to materials with small dimensions

A simplified approach has been proposed to model the drying of capillary-porous materials with small geometric parameters for practical purposes. Luikovʹs theory of mass and heat transfer for capillary-porous bodies was applied to drying of biological materials and it was shown that the thermo diffusion effect can be neglected if the thermal gradient remains small during the whole period of drying. The resulting simplified equations can then be solved using available mathematical software. The simplified equations were applied to drying of wood and a peanut pod.