CONVERGENCE OF NUMERICAL ALGORITHM FOR COUPLED HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER IN TEXTILE MATERIALS

In this paper we propose a fundamental numerical method for heat and moisture transfer model, which is a system of coupled ordinary differential equations(ODEs) on temperature, water vapor pressure, water vapor mass flux and condensation rate through parallel pore textiles. By decoupling the coupled ODEs, four explicit formulations are achieved to describe temperature, water vapor pressure, water vapor mass flux and the rate of condensation respectively. We develop a numerical algorithm for the coupled ODEs by finite difference method (FDM) and further prove that the numerical algorithm is convergent with the convergence rate of the first order theoretically. Numerical simulation is implemented for down and polyester material to verify the validity of the algorithm. The numerical results are well matched with the experiment data on the "Walter" Manikin.