A 3-D version of TransPore:: a comprehensive heat and mass transfer computational model for simulating the drying of porous media

The coupled and highly non-linear nature of the transport equations that govern the drying process highlights the applicability of numerical simulation in this field. This work is devoted to presenting the latest version of TransPore: a unique 3-D drying model that is able to deal with the heat and mass transfer in porous media. The set of equations used in the present work is among the more comprehensive physical descriptions for the drying of a porous medium modelled at the macroscopic scale. Several simulation results are presented that depict the new possibilities offered by such a tool. In particular, the effect of the number of exchange faces is studied both for an isotropic medium (a cube of light concrete) and for an anisotropic medium (a board of wood) where the anisotropy ratios and geometrical factors are large. These simulations prove that only three spatial dimensions are able to capture the effect of the width of the medium in the case of high temperature drying. Indeed, with such conditions, the longitudinal direction is required to highlight the effect of overpressure in a strongly anisotropic medium, while both thickness and width are necessary to account for the coupling between the thermal field and the pressure driven flow. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.