Drying kinetics and mathematical modeling of shredded tobacco under hot air drying

In the traditional tobacco drying process, there is often a problem of uneven drying, which is closely related to drying conditions such as air velocity and temperature. To better understand the drying characteristics of tobacco, its drying kinetic performance were experimentally studied and predicted in this paper. In the drying experiment, the range of air temperature and velocity is 20–60℃ and 0.95–4.93 m/s, respectively. The results show that the effective diffusion coefficient increases with the increase of air temperature and decreases with the increase of air velocity. The effective moisture diffusivity(\({D}_{eff}\)) ranges from 2.077 × 10^–7 to 9.136 × 10^–7 m²/s. Additionally, the activation energy (E_a) is between 14.292 and 21.032 kJ/mol according to Arrhenius law. Among the six commonly used empirical correlations, the logarithmic model has higher prediction accuracy, but it has a prediction deviation of more than 20% in the later stage of drying. Based on the logarithmic model and the two models, a new prediction model of tobacco drying characteristics was proposed with a maximum relative deviation error of less than 1%.