Abstract
Superheated steam drying and highly humid air drying have been applied in many industrial drying fields, such as drying of by-products of food industry. The most significant reason for this wide range of applications of superheated steam is that more water evaporates in this steam or highly humid air than in dry air above the inversion point temperature. As compared with these wide practical applications, fundamental research for determining controlled operating conditions or optimum design conditions for a superheated steam drying system have not been sufficiently performed. From this viewpoint, in experimenting for drying water in the closed circuit dryer, by changing drying variables, such as the mass velocity of heat transfer of the steam,the existance of the inversion point temperature was confirmed and the locus of the temperature were found. The behavior of the locus enables one to specify the drying variables for a controlled drying system. The difference of the evaporation phenomenon between superheated steam drying and conventional air drying was examined from the heat convection standpoint. The reliability of the data obtained from the experiment was too checked by comparing the data with another reported data.
