Industrial air dryer image courtesy of Marion Mixers.

If you want to understand why air dryers are so important to industry, think about the analogy of the hair dryer. Why do people use hair dryers? Being a male, I can’t speak to this first benefit in detail, but I understand that it affects the way a person’s hair looks when it dries. Ignore that reason – it doesn’t have anything to do with the analogy. The other reason, though, does. People use hair dryers because they reduce the amount of time it takes for something, usually hair, to dry after it becomes wet. The way that a hair dryer does this is the same way that industrial air dryers dry industrial products.

Drying, whether in the context of a consumer hair dryer or an industrial air dryer, is all about moisture removal. Moisture removal happens naturally, with or without the help of an artificial agent like a person or a drying machine. Moisture on the surface of something, whether it’s a pool of moisture or a thin layer of moisture on a solid surface, will eventually evaporate (assuming that certain conditions of temperature and ambient pressure favor it). Air dryers speed up the process of evaporation in two ways. First, the stream of forced air causes more moisture molecules to “escape” more quickly. Second, because many air dryers are also equipped with heating elements that cause the stream of air to be heated, the heat also speeds up the evaporation of moisture molecules. The idea here is that these artificial evaporation-inducing forces cause something to become dry more quickly than it would have without artificial intervention.

Air dryers come in many shapes, sizes and configurations. They can be used for the drying of large quantities of small products, or they can be used to dry larger objects.