Drying of two-phase media: Simulation with liquid pressure as driven force

In previous works, a model based on volume averaging theory to describe heat and mass transports in two-phase media has been proposed. The main novelty was to consider both mass and volume conservation of the solid phase in order to avoid the introduction of an arbitrarily law binding the pressure to the volume fraction of the liquid phase. Indeed, this law leads to an equivalent transport coefficient that must be identified numerically by matching experimental and predicted data in such a way that process and internal model become unjustly dependant. Here, the mathematical description is solved. The forecasting of damages and cracks during drying of fully saturated media incites us to simulate transport phenomena which occur in gel (gelatin) during this process. Although the one-dimensional configuration which is considered leads us to reduce the elastic behavior to an ideal shrinkage, the numerical results and the qualitative comparison to experimental measures provide some confidence in the proposed model. (c) 2007 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.