Dookie Campus lecturer Dr Graham Brodie selected to receive an American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Honorable Mention Paper Award
University of Melbourne, Dookie Campus lecturer Dr Graham Brodie has been selected to receive an American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Honorable Mention Paper Award, given in recognition of authorship of a contribution to agricultural engineering literature of exceptional merit, as published by the Society. Graham's paper “Simultaneous Heat and Moisture Diffusion During Microwave Heating of Moist Wood” was accepted after a stringent selection process lasting almost two years between paper submission and selection for the award.
ASABE Paper Awards are selected annually from papers of engineering merit published during the prior year in ASABE publications of Applied Engineering in Agriculture, Transactions of the ASAE or Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. In 2007 approximately 370 manuscripts were approved for publication in the following journals: 224 in Transactions of the ASABE, 98 published in the Applied Engineering in Agriculture and 28 in the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. Of those papers, only nine were selected to receive “superior” Paper Awards and ten which included Graham Brodie's paper were selected to receive Honorable Mention Paper Awards for 2008.
Graham's paper focused on the influence of simultaneous heat and moisture diffusion on moisture movement in porous materials and applying this theory to the problem of microwave heating in moist materials. The redistribution of heat in moist wood during microwave heating appears to be best described by the 'fast wave' diffusion model, predicted by coupling of heat and moisture transport. The simple wood heating experiment and other comparisons presented in Dr Brodie's paper provided some evidence of this phenomenon with further investigation to follow.