The use of cellular automata in the simulation of wood drying processes in a wood drying chamber of periodic action

Abstract

In this work, research the essence of the wood drying process in a periodic wood drying chamber. This paper provides a mathematical model of a wood drying chamber, which describes the general essence of physical drying processes using the equipment available in the wood drying chamber. This approach allows to take into account the physical parameters of the necessary equipment, such as heaters, fans, humidifying nozzles or other. This approach also allows to ignore some design characteristics that may differ depending on the type of wood drying chamber. Considering this, the main task in this work is to determine the temperature and humidity of the drying agent and lumber in the stack, as well as the temperature of the main components of the wood drying chamber. Taking into account such a large number of input parameters and describing a complex non-stationary process of heat transfer, there is a need to create complicated mathematical models. The presence of such mathematical models greatly complicates their application and requires significant computer resources for their calculation. In this way, the mathematical description is reduced to the description of non-linear partial differential equations. To simplify and speed up the calculations of this mathematical model, the use of cellular automata is suggested. To do this, the 3D model of the wood drying chamber is represented as a cell-automatic field, which consists of cells of the same size but different types. As a result, neighboring cells contain local relationships that describe their general behavior. This behavior depends on the type of tangent cells and is described by transition rules based on a mathematical model. Through the use of the developed cell-automatic model and transition rules, it is possible to obtain the values of the temperature and moisture content of the wood in the stack, the drying agent in the chamber, as well as the temperature of the main components of the chamber. The work also shows the corresponding graphs of changes in temperature and moisture content. To check the adequacy and reliability, the obtained results were compared with the results of other authors' experiments. As a result of the verification, the values of the average absolute error aren't high, which confirms the adequacy of the mathematical model and the prospects of using the developed cell-automatic model.