Dryer Moisture Mass Balance Calculator

Real time product moisture percentage is a very valuable parameter to monitor for industrial dryer applications. If a plant is under drying a product, then the product will be out of specification and cannot be sold. On the other hand, if a product is over dried, the plant is wasting energy and losing valuable capacity on the dryer. Over drying by 1% on a 1000 kg/hr dryer results in a yearly average deficit of about 60,000 kg/yr. Depending on the price of the product and size of the dryer, the yield improvements can be quite significant.

Utilizing H2O’s humidity sensor in the exhaust of the process gas in conjunction with inlet gas humidity, % moisture feed solids, process gas flow and end product mass measurements, the product moisture percentage can be calculated in real time.

For mass balances, we use the mass balance spreadsheet which can be downloaded below.  Anything in green is an input from the current dryer measurements including our exhaust H2O sensor and everything in white is calculated from those measurements.  Cell D18 is the calculated exit product moisture. All equations in the spreadsheet will be programmed into the dryer PLC or DCS system and the end product moisture will be displayed on the dryer control panel.

Feel free to contact us to review the inputs in the spreadsheet for your specific dryer.