MODELLING OF DRYING IN ORDER TO IMPROVE PROCESSING QUALITY OF MAIZE

Abstract
Maize is the second largest agricultural produce in France. To be acceptable on national and foreign markets, it must preserve its physico-chemical properties during the drying process that occurs after harvesting, specially the wet-milling quality which is measured, in our case, by the "Turbidity Test". We have tried to make a dynamic model which could simulate all transitory phenomena observed in a real industrial dryer (tempering, condensation) and to predict its quality performance. This dryer conception tool, based on a simple compartmental analysis is useful for fast computations. This concept is described and compared with the experimental results