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A Review of: “Drying of Porous Materials”

Editor: Stefan Jan Kowalski Publisher: Springer, The Netherlands 2007, 231 pp. This book consists of selected peer-reviewed papers, which were presented at the XI Polish Drying Symposium held in Poznan, Poland, during September 13–16, 2005. Seventeen articles, both reviews and original research works, are included. Most articles are of a fundamental nature and a number of them present advanced concepts and applications of mathematical modeling of drying of solids. The quality of the articles and the editorial effort is uniformly high. Following is a brief overview of the contents of this most valuable book for researchers in the field of drying in general. The book starts off with an overview of innovation and need for R&D in drying by Professor A. S. Mujumdar of the National University of Singapore. With the backdrop of his nearly three decades of exposure to drying R&D around the world as the founder and chairman of the IDS series as well as Editor of Drying Technology, he has summarized the current state of drying R&D and identified several areas in need of further research. He promotes the idea of intensifying innovation via mathematical modeling as the most cost-effective way of introducing novel ideas in practice. The following chapter by Professor Z. Pakowski of Lodz Technical University focuses on the currently hot area of nanoparticle production. Y. Itaya and others of Nagoya University, Japan, then provide an excellent summary of their work on enhancement of ceramics drying with microwave fields along with dynamic control. The goal is to prevent cracking during drying. The chapter by S. J. Kowalski and A. Rybicki deals with modeling of the vapor-liquid interface receding into the drying object and the stresses induced by drying of capillary porous bodies. Numerical results are given for drying of a finite kaolin cylinder dried in hot air. Both elastic and viscoelastic models are tested; the model shows that the latter develop a lower level of stresses as expected due to the relaxation phenomenon. Such a model can be used for computer-aided optimization of drying processes. P. Perre provides an excellent exposition and illustration of the multiscale aspects of heat and mass transport during drying of materials such as wood, paper, etc. He proposed and illustrated a stepwise approach, starting with a macroscopic formulation. He differentiated between models involving change of scale (sequential coupling) and multiscale (concurrent coupling). In the future it is expected that multiscale models will become more common as they represent the different phenomena that occur at different time or length scales during drying. A chapter by S. Pabis provides a summary of theoretical models of vegetables drying, and M. Piatkowski and I. Zbicinski provide valuable LDA measurements in a countercurrent spray drying tower. These are followed by an overview by Metzger and others of several modern modeling methods in drying, viz. pore network model, population balance model, and discrete element model. It covers a major field in a short paper; readers will need to refer to the literature cited for details about each of these modeling approaches. Without going into details of the remainder of the book, suffice it to say that all articles are of high quality and of contemporary interest. They cover such diverse topics as unsteady-state drying of kaolin cylinders, a method for identification of diffusivity of bound water in wood, computation of stresses in drying wood, an atmospheric freeze drying model, microwave drying of objects of various shapes, instability of hydrodynamics of a spouted bed, vacuum freeze drying of solids with multicomponent liquids, and drying in a bubbling fluidized bed. Thus, the book covers a panorama of significant problems in drying, both analytically and experimentally. In summary, this book is recommended for libraries that serve engineers and scientists engaged in any aspect of drying R&D. The editor must be congratulated, along with the referees and authors, for their excellent effort.