Reducing energy consumption is one of the most important priorities of nowadays life. Therefore, it is of interest to reduce energy consumption in industrial processes, especially of ceramic products. In this paper, a 1D simple mathematical model to predict gas and solid temperature profiles in tunnel kilns has been developed. For this purpose, three different cases were studied to simulate the process in preheating and burning zones. In each case, the ordinary differential equations are obtained to demonstrate the heat transfer and energy consumption along the kiln. In addition, the influence of fuel distribution along the firing zone on the temperature profiles was studied. The results showed that the energy consumption is always increases progressively with the firing zone length. Therefore, up to approximately 30% of the firing zone, the increase in energy is relatively low and as a consequence, the firing zone length should be as short as possible for low energy consumption. The MATLAB program was used especially the bvp4c code to solve all the ordinary differential equations (ODEs) systems to obtain the temperature profiles for all cases. |
