An experiment was performed in Northern Maine recently to evaluate the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in the measurement of soil moisture content in small area plots with varying surface cover and at various subsurface depths. Ground preparation efforts involved defining six contiguous 30 m x 30 m plots with three surface cover conditions: bare tilled soil, short grass and forest. F...

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of initial moisture content on the in-vessel composting under air pressure of organic fraction of municipal solid waste in Morocco in terms of internal temperature, produced gases quantity, organic matter conversion rate, and the quality of the final composts.For this purpose, in-vessel bioreactor was designed and used to evaluate both appropriate initial...

An investigation of the drying of spherical food particles was performed, using peas as the model material. In the development of a mathematical model for drying curves, moisture diffusion was modelled using Fick’s second law for mass transfer. The resulting partial differential equation was solved using a forward-time central-space finite difference approximation, with the assumption of variab...

Time-domain reflectometry (TDR) can be used to predict the moisture content in porous materials, including soil, and is an exciting tool that could be used to measure the moisture content in wet-stored wood. Three-rod probes with 127 mmor 152 mm-long rods were inserted into 62 loblolly pine and 34 sweetgum saturated bolts. The bolts were air dried over a span of five weeks. TDR waveforms and mo...

Injecting water into a coal seam to enhance the cohesive strength of coal and thus minimize and reduce the coal wall spalling risk must be considered in underground coal mining systems. In general, coal with low cohesive strength contains clay minerals which may affect the stability of coal by interacting with water. Therefore, the coupled effects of moisture content and inherent clay minerals ...

This paper reports recent attempts for implementing non-destructive measuring of moisture content in wood based on computed tomography technology. The study focus on an image analysis method that has been already proposed and validated in the literature, but it has not been tested for measuring low moisture content variations below fibre saturation point. The computed tomography method was test...

Thermodynamic adsorption properties (differential enthalpy and entropy, spreading pressure and net integral enthalpy and entropy) of cassava flour were determined at 25, 30 and 35°C to provide information about the water and energy requirements for the sorption process. The Guggenheim–Anderson–de Boer (GAB), Peleg and Halsey models were found to adequately describe the sorption characteristics,...