PRODUCT QUALITY MULTI-OBJECTIVE DRYER DESIGN

Design of conveyor-belt dryers constitutes a mathematical programming problem involving the evaluation of appropriate structural and operational process variables so that total annual plant cost involved is optimized. The increasing need for dehydrated products of the highest quality, imposes the development of new criteria that, together with cost, determine the design rules for drying processes. Quality of dehydrated products is a complex resultant of properties characterizing the final products, where the most important one is color. Color is determined as a three-parameter resultant, whose values for products undergone drying should deviate from the corresponding ones of natural products, as little as possible. In this case, product quality dryer design is a complex multi-objective optimization problem, involving the color deviation vector as an objective function and as constraints the ones deriving from the process mathematical model. The mathematical model of the dryer was developed and the fundamental color deterioration laws were determined for the drying process. Non-preference multi-criteria optimization methods were used and the Pareto-optimal set of efficient solutions was evaluated. An example covering the drying of sliced potato was included to demonstrate the performance of the design procedure, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed approach.