Computational implementation of interfacial kinetic transport theory for water vapour transport in porous media

Abstract

A computational framework is developed for applying interfacial kinetic transport theory to predict water vapour permeability of porous media. Modified conservation equations furnish spatially periodic disturbances from which the average flux and, thus, the effective diffusivity is obtained. The equations are solved exactly for a model porous medium comprising parallel layers of gas and solid with arbitrary solid volume fraction. From the microscale effective diffusivity, a two-point boundary-value problem is solved at the macroscale to furnish the water vapour transport rate in membranes subjected to a finite RH differential. Then, the microscale model is implemented using a computational framework (extended finite-element method) to examine the role of particle size, aspect ratio and positioning for periodic arrays of aligned super-ellipses (model particles that pack with high density). We show that the transverse water vapour permeability can be reduced by an order of magnitude only when fibres with a high-aspect ratio cross section are packed in a periodic staggered configuration. Maximum permeability is achieved at intermediate micro-structural length scales, where gas-phase diffusion is enhanced by surface diffusion, but not limited by interfacial-exchange kinetics. The two-dimensional computations demonstrated here are intended to motivate further efforts to develop efficient computational solutions for realistic three-dimensional microstructures.