Image analysis of holdup patterns in flighted rotary dryer

An image analysis technique was developed to estimate the amount of material within the flights of a rotating drum and to determine optimum loading condition. The flight hold up experiment involved taking multiple photographs of the cross sectional area of the material within the dryer at different loading conditions. The image analysis involved developing and verifying a combined ImageJ and MATLAB process to estimate the cross-sectional area of material in the flights. The suitability of the developed methodology was ascertained. In addition, the design load was estimated using conventional design criterion based on the saturation of material at the first unloading flight and in the entire upper half of the drum