Comparison of two model reduction approaches of an industrial drying process

Dynamic models have proven to be helpful for determining the residual water content in combustible biomass. However, these models often require partial differential equations, which render simulations impracticable when several thousand particles need to be considered, such as in the drying of wood chips. Reduced-order models help to overcome this problem. We compare proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) based to balanced truncation based reduced-order models. Both reduced models are lean enough for an application to systems with many particles, but the model based on balanced truncation shows more accurate results.