Static pressure drop across a bed of coffee beans: finite element analysis

Abstract

Several are the post-harvest processes of agricultural products in which a fluid flows through a fixed bed of particles. Therefore, the objective of this work was to model the static pressure drop in a bed filled with coffee beans (Coffea arábica L.) with different water contents, submitted to different airflows. The pressure drop results using the finite element technique were satisfactorily adjusted to the data obtained by a classical method, where the pressure drop along the elevation of the coffee column varied linearly between 158.8 and 455.6 Pa, for the column depths of 0.45 and 0.95 m, respectively. The relative error, by this technique remained below 5 %, for all samples. The distributed resistance had an average of 7,2 x 107 m-2, with an average relative error of 0.3 %, for all treatments considered.