Toward a thermodynamics and mechanics of drying processes

The paper is concerned with deformations and drying-induced stresses of moistened capillary-porous medium during intensive drying. A non-linear theory of drying is constructed based on the concept of mixture theory and the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The porous material is considered for a "container" interacting with the mixture of liquid and gas filling the pores. The coupled system of differential equations describing the mechanical behaviour of moist material during drying as well as the distributions of temperature and moisture content is derived in the paper. Diversified constituent temperatures are considered, what makes possible to apply the presented model to intensive drying processes. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.