Experimental investigation of a novel incinerator flue gas-based convective food drying system: design, CFD simulation, and performance evaluation

Engineering notes

Key topics: autonomous driving, deployment. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Abstract Post-harvest food loss and the high energy demand of conventional drying threaten food security in many developing regions. This study presents and experimentally validates a zero-energy convective food dryer that recovers low-grade waste heat from a small-scale municipal solid waste (MSW) incinerator. A counter-flow tube-in-tube heat exchanger was designed using the Logarithmic Mean Temperature Difference (LMTD) method and validated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in ANSYS using the realizable k–ε turbulence model. The model predicted an outlet air temperature of 68.39 °C against the 70 °C design target (2.30% deviation). Thermoelectric generators mounted on the incinerator lid powered the blowing fan (peak output 17.8 W), rendering the system fully self-sufficient in electrical energy. Potato, carrot, and green banana were dried at approximately 60–61 °C for 180 min, reducing their moisture ratios to 0.34–0.43. The total colour change (ΔE) values ranged from 10.6 to 15.5, remaining within the commercially accepted range. Heat-balance analysis showed that combustion of 10 kg of MSW released 222,135 kJ, of which 53,535 kJ was recoverable from the flue gas. This recovery amount corresponds to a waste-heat utilisation efficiency of 29.0% and a heat-exchanger effectiveness of approximately 24%. The system offers a low-cost, near-zero-emission post-harvest solution for waste-intensive developing regions. But field deployment will require mandatory inlet-air filtration and consideration of long-term heat-exchanger fouling.

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