Modeling of Heat and Mass Transfer at the Boundary Between A Porous Medium and Its Surroundings

Abstract Heat and mass transfer at the frontier of a multiphase medium and its surroundings are only theoretically well described under boundary layer hypothesis. In the other cases, theoretical study of interfacial transfer is very difficult due to the geometry of the physical frontier between the material and its surroundings, or due to the process by itself: vacuum drying, high temperature drying, steam drying, etc.… In these cases transfer coefficients cannot be defined rigorously. Hence it is necessary to solve Navier–Stokes equations in the surroundings of the product in order to get information about the boundary conditions for the transport equations in the medium and solve the complete drying problem. In this article, a coupling method is presented in the case of convective drying of a hygroscopic capillary-porous medium and a 2-D numerical simulation is proposed.