Abstract

The objective of this study is to determine some physic-chemical properties of raffia Vinifera fibres resulting from the stem. The moisture content rate of these fibres was evaluated along the stem and varies in the intervals [12-6] % and [19-107] % for dry and fresh fibres respectively. Thermo gravimetric method using the temperatures 60, 70 and 80°C respectively, enables us, through Fick’s 2^nd law, to find other parameters. Owing to the data on the moisture content, the different curves were plotted. Fourteen models were tested to predict the drying kinetics of fibres with cylindrical form. It comes out that the models “Diffusion approach” and “Verma et al. (1985)” models fitted well with the phenomenon. The effective diffusion coefficient of the initial phase varies in the intervals $[6.32×10^{-11} -3.00×10^{-10} ] m^2/s$ and $[1.76×10^{10} -4.47×10^{10}] m^2/s$ for dry and fresh fibres respectively. We notice that the moisture content and the effective diffusion coefficient grow from the periphery towards the centre in each cross-section. Owing to the relation of Arrhenius, the activation energy was evaluated only in the initial phase and oscillates respectively in [4.72 – 22.86] KJ/mol.K and [4.65 – 12.13] KJ/mol.K for dry and fresh fibres.

Keywords:

Activation energy, diffusion coefficient, mathematical model, moisture content, raffia vinifera,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.