Design and Performance Testing of Furnace for Rubber Sheet Drying

This article presents the design, construction and performance testing of a biomass furnace used in drying rubber sheet. Indirect heating method is used to make hot air. A small blower is used to run the hot air throughout the drying system. Thus, the proposed drying system is classified as the forced convection type. Shell and tube heat exchanger with multi-pass of flow in tube is employed to increase the heat transfer area. The furnace walls are made of bricks and cement to be the combustion chamber of firewood, packed with the heat exchanger. The experiments are setup to investigate the performance of furnace including average air velocity in the drying chamber, time variation of temperature of air flow in the tube throughout the system and time variation of moisture content in the rubber sheet during drying process.