Improvement of thermal distribution in the rubber-glove former conveyor oven by openFOAM

Abstract

© 2020, Chulalongkorn University, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts. All rights reserved. The great number of rubber-glove formers was dried by the hot-air after dipping into the coagulant tank. The wet rubber-glove had been conveyed by chain into the oven with the producing speed and then the hot-air was blown to impinge the rubber-glove formers by the hot-air branch ducts which were installed under the conveyor chain paths. The traditional design of hot-air branch ducts was the cause which the rubber-glove formers were not achieved the hot-air thoroughly even though the grille of hot-air branch ducts was opened along the path of former motion. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) had been applied to model and analyze the hot-air flow through the grille of the branch hot-air ducts inside the conveyor oven. The open source codes CFD software (OpenFOAM) was used to perform the computational technique to simulate the complex hot-air flow. The hot-air branch ducts were improved to control the hot-air temperature distribution for the most uniformity regarding the CFD results. The temperature comparison between CFD and experiment at each point along the oven length was found that the CFD model confirmed an effective improvement and accuracy under an average error was less than 8.99%.