Abstract The macadamia tree is known for producing fruit high in fats, enclosed in very hard woody shells. Macadamia nut shell, considered as a by-product from macadamia nut processing, may be a suitable option for pyrolysis. These residues are constituted of cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and extractives. The Independent Parallel Reaction (IPR) Model has been applied in this work to study the pyrolysis of macadamia nut shell from thermogravimetric experiments. The kinetic parameters and mass fraction of each component were estimated using the Differential Evolution Algorithm. The influence of the model parameters was also analyzed by means of sensitivity studies. The results showed that the decomposition of the macadamia nut shell is more sensitive to the parameters related to the decomposition of lignin. The results of sensitivity analysis also showed that the activation energy affects the total biomass conversion more strongly than the other parameters and the contribution of extractives in the IPR model is as important as the hemicellulose.

This study analyzed the influence of the following parameters: overall volumetric heat transfer coefficient, coefficient of heat loss, drying rate, specific heat of the solid and specific heat of dry air on the prediction of a model for the fertilizer drying in rotary dryers. The method of parametric sensitivity using an experimental design was employed in this study. All parameters studied significantly affected the responses of the drying model. In general, the model showed greater sensitivity to the parameters drying rate and overall volumetric heat transfer coefficient.

The aim of this work was to analyze the heat and mass transfer between the air and soybean seeds in a concurrent moving bed dryer with an air profile that is not flat. The modelling of heat and mass transfer in moving bed dryers is generally based on the application of mass and energy balance equations for both solid and fluid phases (two-phase model). In the establishment of these equations some classical hypotheses such as that the fluid velocity profile is flat, are assumed. The main goal of this work was to verify the validity of this assumption by means of an experimental and simulation study in a concurrent moving bed, using soybean seeds as particles. In this work, the radial air profile was taken into account by means of a suitable empirical correlation and a mechanistic model validated by experimental results. The numerical solution of the one-dimension boundary value problem was obtained by means of a computational code based on axial integration through the DASSL code. By comparison of the experimental data and the simulated responses for air temperature and seed moisture content, it was possible to verify the significant effect of air velocity distribution.