• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.1341-1352
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• 2001

Vacuum freeze drying process by which frozen water in a drying material is removed sublimation under vacuum condition, is now applied to various industrial field such as the manufacturing and packaging of pharmaceuticals in pharmaceutical industry, the drying of bio- products in bio-technology industry, the treatment of various quality food stuff in food technology, and so on. The Knowledge about the heat and mass transfer characteristics related with the vacuum freeze drying process is crucial to improve the efficiency of the process as well as the quality of dried products. In spite of increasing needs for understanding of the process, the research efforts in this fields are still insufficient. In this paper, a numerical code that can predict primary drying in a vial is developed based on the finite volume method with a moving grid system. The calculation program can handle the axis- symmetric and multi-dimensional characteristics of heat and mass transfer of the vial freeze drying process. To demonstrated the usefulness of the present analysis, a practical freeze drying of skim Milk solution in a vial is simulated and various calculation results are presented.