A Comparison of Drying Technologies for Solids and Liquids

Drying is an important process, ubiquitous on earth, and in space applications it is an unavoidable aspect of advanced life support technology. We analyze several solid and liquid waste treatment processes that involve drying as a primary operation and consider factors such as energy use, volume, mass, crew time upstream relief and downstream burden. The entry points of resources such as electrical energy, thermal energy, mass influent and effluent and crew time are discussed in the context of a common drying schematic, compared using generalized flow diagrams, and a table is provided to grasp the relative magnitudes.