variavel0=<b>RAIMUNDO PEREIRA DE FARIAS</b> -  UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA PARAÍBA/CCT/DEM
<b>DEIVTON COSTA SANTIAGO</b> -  UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA PARAÍBA/CCT/DEM
<b>ANTONIO GILSON BARBOSA DE LIMA</b> - gilson@dem.ufpb.br UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA PARAÍBA/CCT/DEM
<b>Abstract.</b> Dehydration operations or drying are important steps in the chemical industries and food processing, as well as in the storage and processing of fruits and other biological products. The optimization of the drying process is directly linked to the drying equipment, to be projected and selected so that a favorable combination of cost and final quality of the biological product is assisted. This requests that more advanced studies of mathematical modeling and optimization of processes and equipments are realized. The proposal of the modeling is to allow the engineer to choose the most appropriate drying method of a product and better drying conditions, tends in view the best quality of the product at the end of the process. In this sense, the objective of this work is to present the mathematical modeling to predict the drying of solids in a cross flow belt conveyor band dryer. All the heat and mass conservation equations were discretized using the finite-volume method and the upwind interpolation scheme for the convective terms. Results of the temperature distributions and relative humidity of the air-drying, as well as, the temperature distributions and moisture content of the product along the thickness of the bed and of the dryer are presented and analyzed.
<b>Keywords.</b> drying, drier, belt conveyor, cross flow, yellow corn kernel.