THERMAL AND MECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF GRAIN STORAGE SILOS UNDER FORCED AERATION CONDITIONS USING ADVANCED MODELLING METHODS

Abstract

The most important storage problems in wheat silos are heat and moisture accumulation and there are no early warning systems to know the occurrence of heat and humidity generation. Silo wall and bottom stresses changes are investigated to be suitable indicators for early warning and controlled aeration.\xa0Aeration is a popular tool, used to treat and modify the microclimate of grain bulk. A model silo with three horizontal and vertical load cells was constructed for heat and moisture transfer studying under the influence of three different airflow rates and patterns of aerations with three unlike heights of\xa0stored wheat during winter season of 2016 in the laboratory of Agricultural Process Engineering, Agricultural Engineering Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Kafrelsheikh University. The three vertical load cells were homogenously distributed to measure the stresses from the three longitudinal prism sections on bottom layer which provides information about mass transfers among longitudinal sections. As by same technique the horizontal load cells afford data about mass transfer among horizontal layers. For heat transfer monitoring, three vertical thermocouples were installed at equal heights.\xa0Storage quality indicators are temperature gradient among wheat layers and loads differences among longitudinal and horizontal sections, as the storage system keeps the temperature gradient and vertical loads differences to be at lower levels, and then the system has higher storage efficiency.