Study of Heat and Mass Transfer in Porous Media: Application to Packed-Bed Drying

This work focuses on tyipical heat and mass transfer phenomena during the processing of products in the context of the packed-bed drying method (products arranged in thick layers into dryers working in forced convection mode). The dryers are modeled as porous media at the macroscopic level. The simulations are carried out using the mass, momentum (written in the framework of the Darcy's law approximation) and energy equations applied for the different components. A diffusion model based on Fick's law is also used to take into account the drying kinetics. This approach allowsmonitoring of the variations of humidity and temperature (of themedium and the heated air) in time and space. A non-homogeneous drying of the different layers is observed. It is found that the process is strongly affected by external conditions (in particular, the temperature of the heated air).