Modeling of conduction heat transfer between rice grains stored in a grain silo prototype

Resumo

Grain storage is a vital operation to maintain the quality of the grains, for this you need to have control
over the stored temperature and humidity. Therefore, the objective of this work is through mathematical modeling
to simulate the internal temperature of the rice grains inside the silo. For the resolution of the model, the transfer

of heat by conduction between grains was taken into account, taking into account the type of grain and the dimen-
sions of the silo (height and radius), using classic methods of resolution, such as separation of variables, Laplace

transform and GILTT. To validate the models, experimental data generated are used for the case study. A solution
using only the dimension of the height of the silo T(z,t) showed a good correlation with the experimental data.
While the model, with the temperature depending on the radius of the silo, T (r, t), had results that were more
distant from the experimental data and the model T(r,z,t) had an accuracy higher than the one-dimensional ones in
the first moments of time. Therefore, the results presented show that the proposed methods are great alternative
tools to predict the temperature inside the silos.