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I work in an industry and I need to remove water from a system.

The scenario:

There is a washer and a blower on a conveyor belt. The item being washed is plastic (not sure what type) and can't be wet after it leaves the blower. However, because the plastic is only an empty container for the actual product, and therefore the conveyor belt runs at an optimal operational speed for the actual product, it only gets about 1-2 seconds under the blower and is generally still wet. The washer water and blower air are not heated or cooled and each is in a somewhat closed system.

My question:

How would I go about removing the water? All together on one piece of plastic there would be no more than 10 grams of water spread across.

My ideas so far:

Heat the blower air to 150-ish , hope it evaporates in under 2 seconds and have an extraction fan removing water vapour from the system.

OR (and preferably because the heated air will negate to some extent the cooling fans of the entire processing plant)

Basically the same as above but instead of hot air I was thinking microwave EMR.

So,

As I'm not up with my temperature equilibrium ow whatever: is one of my ideas plausible? Do any of you have better ideas? Any supporting maths would also be appreciated.

Thanks :)

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  • $\begingroup$ microwave is an interesting idea, but you would have to make sure the plastic was moved about (but I guess the coveyor belt will look after that). - another idea is to blow in cold air at high speed. Save the cost of heating the air - but this might blow your plastic containers around. if they are not held. ---- Maybe best would be combination of microwave and cold air.... $\endgroup$ – tom Jan 8 '15 at 11:49
  • $\begingroup$ Depending on the plastic and as @tom said,cold might work. One could even freeze the water and some small mechanical forces make the ice fall off. Rinsing in liquid Nitrogen is probably not practical, but could give some ideas. $\endgroup$ – mikuszefski Jan 8 '15 at 13:53
  • $\begingroup$ I don't see a microwave heating working in a production line... Heating the air flow and extracting vapor (maybe drying the incoming air) seems MUCH more plausible. 2 seconds seems really short though. $\endgroup$ – TZDZ Jan 8 '15 at 14:12
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    $\begingroup$ This is a better question for Engineering.SE (actually, it's a perfect question for it!) I ask you to please join the beta site, which is about to launch, and re-ask the question there. It will be a great opener for that community! $\endgroup$ – New Alexandria Jan 8 '15 at 14:27