Modeling the Process of Sawn Timber Drying

The article considers the problem of sawn timber drying. The relevance of research is driven by the need to improve the automated process control system for drying sawn timber on the basis of modern information technologies, as well as to reduce the energy intensity of these technologies, which is enshrined in the program documents of forest industry development at the government level. The functional purpose of the automated control system is to provide a set level of the wood moisture content with the required quality of wood (zero ruptures). It is of immense complexity to obtain such functional dependency on the heating temperature in the chamber and the equilibrium air humidity by traditional statistical methods due to the uncertainty conditions of parameters, therefore, the apparatus of the fuzzy set theory should be used. Thus, the research purpose included generation of functional dependences of the sawn timber moisture content and drying time on the heating temperature and the equilibrium air humidity in the drying chamber based on fuzzy inference. The methodological basis of the theoretical studies was as follows: the theory of drying; the provisions of  athematical and fuzzy modeling; and, in terms of checking the adequacy of the proposed fuzzy model, the methods of mathematical statistics and experimental theory. The research results are the obtained dependences of the moisture content of sawn timber and drying time on the heating temperature and the equilibrium air humidity in the drying chamber, the synthesis of which is performed by means of Fuzzy Logic Toolbox of MATLAB application. The proposed functions of the moisture content and sawn timber drying time take into account the basic process configurations (the heating temperature and the equilibrium air humidity) and are experimentally verified for adequacy. The practical applicability of the results lies in the possibility of creating an intelligent system of automatic control of the sawn timber drying process.For citation: Gorokhovsky A.G., Pobedinsky V.V., Shishkina E.E., Pobedinskiy E.V. Modeling the Process of Sawn Timber Drying. Lesnoy Zhurnal [Russian Forestry Journal], 2020, no. 1, pp. 154–166. DOI: 10.37482/0536-1036-2020-1-154-166