Abstract—In this study, a software has been developed to predict the optimum drying conditions of viscose, wool, polyester and cotton based yarn bobbins for drying in a pressurized hot air dryer. For this purpose, firstly, a suitable drying model has been found in defining the drying behavior of bobbins using the experimental drying behavior. After that, additional regression analyses have been made to take into account the effect of the drying parameters on drying. Then, a software has been developed using Visual Basic programming language. With the aid of this software, optimum drying conditions for drying time and energy consumption can be obtained for the cotton, viscose, polyester and wool based yarn bobbins. Keywords—Drying, Optimum conditions, Moisture ratio, Visual basic, Yarn bobbins. I. INTRODUCTION HE main objective of any drying process is to produce a dried product of desired quality at minimum cost and maximum throughput and to optimize these factors consistently [1, 2]. Bobbins are passed through several processes such as dyeing and drying before they become market-ready-products. The purpose of drying is to remove the water inside the bobbins. Part of the water in the bobbins is removed mechanically. But this mechanical process is not sufficient to remove water entirely. Therefore, a pressurized convective air dryer is generally used after this process. Drying is a time consuming, energy intensive and expensive process and constitutes one of the major cost elements among the finishing operations in textile industry. Therefore it is very important to determine optimum drying conditions and accordingly to develop automatic control systems, drying algorithms and software in such systems. For example in a study performed by Yankov and Deliiski (2007), a programmable control system for the convective drying of Manuscript received September 22, 2011: Revised version received xxx. This work was supported by TÜBİTAK under Grant 108M274. H. Kuşçu, K. Kahveci and A. Cihan is with the Mechanical Engineering Department, Trakya University, Edirne, Turkey (phone: 0090-532-4953660; fax: 0090-284-2261217; e-mail: hilmi@trakya.edu.tr). U. Akyol is with the Mechanical Engineering Department, Çorlu Faculty of Engineering, Namik Kemal University, Çorlu, Tekirdag, Turkey (phone: 0090-282-6529475; fax: 0090-282-6529372; e-mail: uakyol@nku.edu.tr). lumber in chambers is developed, based on specially designed drying algorithm [3]. In another study, technical considerations for design and construction of the experimental model for an automatic microwave drying system for construction materials have been presented [4]. In this study, a software has been developed to obtain optimum drying conditions for viscose, wool, polyester and cotton based yarn bobbins. For this purpose, firstly, a suitable drying model has been found in defining the drying behavior of bobbins using the experimental drying behavior. After that, further regression analyses have been performed to obtain drying time and energy consumption equations depending on the drying parameters. The developed software specifies the optimum drying conditions using these equations. II. MATERIAL AND METHOD A PLC controlled pressurized hot-air bobbin dryer was used to obtain the drying behavior of viscose, wool, polyester and cotton based yarn bobbins. The schematic view of the experimental setup is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 schematic view of the experimental bobbin dryer A software for calculation of optimum conditions for cotton, viscose, polyester and wool based yarn bobbins in a hot-air bobbin dryer H. Kuşçu, K. Kahveci, U. Akyol and A. Cihan T INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS IN SIMULATION Issue 1, Volume 6, 2012 83