How to design the drying of porous materials?

Abstract

Abstract The convective drying of porous materials is studied at the pore scale using a two-component two-phase Lattice Boltzmann model. Capillary pumping from coarse to fine pores is found to enhance the drying in first drying period at high rate. A ‘toy’ model of four connected channels is developed to design the drying of porous materials. This approach has to be seen to supplement the continuum modelling of drying using known moisture transport properties and convective moisture transfer coefficient, allowing to better understand convective drying and design the pore structure to optimize the drying rate.