Wood drying processes

The team’s multidisciplinary research demonstrates a strong interaction with industry and highlights the applicability of computational and applied mathematics to important environmental problems such as the drying of Australian softwood and hardwood species. An excellent outcome of a 25-year collaboration with Professor Perré from Université Paris–Saclay is the development of drying models that have been used by drying engineers in Australia and France to optimise kiln drying schedules. Recent work with the Forest Products team in the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries has seen this software now extended for the vacuum drying of Australian hardwood. Some of the past modelling projects include simulating high temperature convective drying of Australian softwood species, vacuum drying of softwood and hardwood species, and a pilot study of microwave drying.

Much of the modelling work focuses on the use of novel multiscale modelling techniques. The approaches used for simulating transport in porous media include:

1. upscaling techniques such as homogenisation, where calculations on a representative ‘microcell’ are used to derive the effective coefficients in the macroscopic averaged equations.
2. multiscale finite volume techniques, where an approximate fine-scale solution is reconstructed based on a two-level coarse grid solution.
3. distributed microstructure models, which consist of coupled continuum equations that have to be solved simultaneously at the macroscopic and microscopic (microcell) scales.