A heuristic approach to the automated analysis of drying curves

In the context of ceramics production, the purpose of drying is to remove water from a ceramic body after forming. Drying should be performed at an appropriate rate, at an acceptable cost, and in such a way as not to damage the ceramic body. Although the determination of the best drying conditions is critical to ceramics production, the experimental determination of drying parameters, particularly of the critical moisture content, use to be very subjective. In this work, we propose an empirical mathematical expression, based on the generalized logistic model, which is capable of describing the complete drying curve. The critical moisture is thus unambiguously obtained as the intersection point of two straight lines derived from the mathematical modeling of the full drying curve. The heuristic proposed in this work may find particular application in automated procedures, data acquisition, and analysis of drying curves of ceramic masses.