Week 4 – New Member and Project Research

September 22, 2024 in Fall Semester

Welcome New Team Member Thomas Scott! 

For our first order of business this week, we would like to welcome our new teammate, Thomas Scott to our team! We are excited to be able to work with you throughout this project.  

Back to work, we have been diligently researching dryer technology and have found all sorts of interesting things. One interesting topic was using ultrasound vibrations to break down cell walls in industrial food drying [1]. The intention of breaking the cell walls is to improve the total moisture removal from the feedstock to have a better-quality product, but some of that water is trapped behind the cell walls. The below graphic shows that ultrasound can be used to deteriorate the cell wall and make that moisture available for mass transfer. 

Figure 1. The Graphs depict Frequency of the ultrasound [Hz] v. Conductivity of the tissue [A]. [1] From the Graphs, it can be inferred that as more cell walls are broken by the ultrasound and the treatment, the conductivity increases. The increase in conductivity can be correlated with an increase of available water from the cell wall breaking.  

References:  

[1] Tsotsas, Evangelos, and Mujumdar, Arun S., eds. 2014. Modern Drying Technology, Volume 5 : Process Intensification. Newark: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Accessed September 20, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central. 

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