Seleção de materiais para secadores horizontais rotativos

Abstract

Due to the high consumption and production of grains in Brazil and in the world, a good processing is necessary to maintain the good quality of the grains. The processing consists of several steps, and one of them is the drying of the grains. The drying can be natural or artificial, and for the artificial one, a horizontal rotary dryer is used. This equipment has a drying chamber and inside of it, some components, are made of SAE 1010 steel sheets. This material must be able to withstand the wear resistance, good mechanical properties to not fail in operation. The high consumption of raw material for the production of the horizontal rotary dryer causes the final value of this product to be high, and then it becomes necessary the search for cost reduction to maintain the competitiveness in the market. Through analysis for material selection, it is possible to seek cost reduction as well as the most appropriate material for a certain application. Thus, analyzes were performed for cost reduction in the drying chamber component, by reducing the weight of the material already used or possibly replacing the material. The chosen component was the coating plates of the drying chamber, for being the highest cost component for the dryer’s production. For coating analysis, the material selection steps (translation, sorting, classification and documentation) were carried out following Ashby's method. The analyzes were limited to low carbon steels, due to the component requirements and also by similarity screening. After all, it was possible to determine two low carbon steels for the documentation stage, SAE 1010 and SAE 1020 steel, because these ones corresponded to the criteria established during the analysis. However, by analysis, it was possible to conclude that the SAE 1010 steel, already used for the manufacture, remains a good option for manufacturing the coatings of the drying chamber.