Pneumatic drying of solid particle: experimental and model comparison

Manuscript id: EHT 2006-049

Author response of the reviewer’s comments

Question: Title is not adequate. Title should reflect that drying of fluidized particles is the
subject of paper.
Answer: Thank you for the correction and suggestion from reviewer. In the revised manuscript,
we modified the title of our manuscript into: pneumatic drying of solid particle: experimental
and model comparison that more focus on drying on particle following reviewer’s suggestion.

Question: Expression used for FB should be given explicitly. Considering the buoyancy forces
as a significant contribution sounds very odd for big particles (on the order of 200 μm and
more) of density at least 1000 times greater than the surrounding gas. Hence this part of the
paper should be clarified.
Answer: Thank you. The calculation of buoyancy force (FB) was done by solving Eq. 1 at
minimum flow rate of drying gas.

Question: The local gas velocity is not computed. The flow is probably turbulent. Thus the
computation of residence time is quite simplified. The average gas velocity probably varies
along the dryer, etc. The fluid mechanics part of the problem is therefore overly simplified. This
may explain in part the discrepancies with experiments. The authors should comment on these
points in the paper.
Answer: Thank you for reviewer’s comment. In this experiment, the flow rate of the gas was
not calculated and the flow pattern is much (20 times) higher the Reynold number of the
minimum turbulence. The gas flow is turbulence and we neglect the variation of the local gas
velocity along tube radial. This is probles has been added in the revised manuscript as an point
of assumption used in the calculation.

Question: The method used for solving Eq.(1) must be given

Answer: Thank you for the sufggestion from the reviewer.

Question: Nomenclature is not complete, for example what does ΔTLMTD represent in Eq.(13) ?
kf in Eq.(14), etc
Answer: Thank you for the correction. In the previous manuscript, we write ΔT LMTD stands for
the temperature difference based on logarithmic mean temperature difference. It is equal to ΔTM
which was already written in the nomenclature. In the revised manuscript, we change ΔT LMTD
with ΔTM. We also added some coefficient which was missing in the previous manuscript.

Question: Analysis of forces (Figure 3b) is not convincing if one does not accept the buoyancy
forces as a significant contribution.
Answer:

Question: Fig3c vertical axis: should be umf and not ug

Answer: We put ug because ug (superficial gas flow rate) is more general than umf which is
written down clearly than it was umf in the figure description. However, in order to avoid
ambiguous and follow the reviewer suggestion, we change ug into umf.

Question: How is the particle temperature measured (p.9 right above Eq.(15)
Answer: In the case of particle temperature measurement, we use a portable radiation
pyrometer. At the bottom of the cyclone, we put a chamber to collect the sample and we install
non-contact pyrometer which will measure the temperature of the particle.

Question: The English needs serious improvements.

Answer: Thank you for reviewer comment related to the linguistic problem. In the revised
manuscript, we checked carefully all of sentences written in the paper.

Question: There are many typos.

Answer:

Related with the previous or prior works of non-catalytic methane conversion by plasma as
reviewer explained, what we can explain here is that we added this information in this
manuscript in order to ease the reader to make a comparison with the results using catalyst. In
the revised manuscript, we put this information to clarify it. However, our previous paper and
this manuscript have completely different purpose. In the previous paper, we want to compare
between plasma and thermal process while in this manuscript, we focused on the catalyst and
plasma.

Thank you for the comments, suggestion, and questions from reviewer and editor. We are very
welcomed for other questions or suggestion to make this manuscript better.