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This paper focuses on indirect biomass drying. It compares the operating characteristics of a laboratory-scale drum dryer and a pilot-scale rotary dryer. Before the design of an industrial dryer for a specific material, it is important to experimentally prove the process and to determine the drying characteristics of the material. To verify the portability of experimental results for indirect dryers, a drum dryer with indirect electric heating in a laboratory scale was designed and built to test and study the process of indirect drying. Based on the results obtained on a small-scale device, a prototype of a pilot steam-heated rotary dryer was designed and manufactured. A broad range of experiments with green wood chips and wet bark from open-air storage with moisture contents of 50 to 65 wt % were carried out on both dryers. The drying curves indicating the process, the square and volumetric evaporation capacities, and the drying energy consumption were obtained and compared, and the feasibility of indirect drying for these tested types of biomass was confirmed.

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Abstract. This paper deals with the condensation of water vapour in the presence of non-condensable air. Experimental and theoretical solutions of this problem are presented here. A heat exchanger for the condensation of industrial waste steam containing infiltrated air was designed. The condenser consists of a bundle of vertical tubes in which the steam condenses as it flows downwards with cooling water flowing outside the tubes in the opposite direction. Experiments with pure steam and with mixtures of steam with added air were carried out to find the dependence of the condensation heat transfer coefficient (HTC) on the air concentration in the steam mixture. The experimental results were compared with the theoretical formulas describing the cases. The theoretical determination of the HTC is based on the Nusselt model of steam condensation on a vertical wall, where the analogy of heat and mass transfer is used to take into account the behaviour of air in a steam mixture during the condensation process. The resulting dependencies obtained from the experiments and obtained from the theoretical model have similar results. The significant decrease in the condensation HTC, which begins at very low air concentrations in a steam mixture, was confirmed.

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