Modeling Of Infrared Drying Of Polymer Solutions

This thesis presents the development of dynamic models for drying a coating polymer layer placed on fixed and moving substrate in a dryer using infrared (IR) heat source. The IR drying model is a set of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) arising from simultaneous mass and heat balances and they describe variations of the solvent concentration and the polymer system temperature during the drying process. The model was numerically solved in MATLAB environment and then validated using data from literature. Using polyvinyl acetate (in toluene) as a coating material on a polyester substrate, the simulation revealed that the model agrees with data and describes adequately well the drying kinetics. The modeling approach was also extended to simulate the drying of a polymer solution in a container. Since solvent and polymer molecular sizes are quite different, the diffusion coefficient was better described with free volume theory.