Fluid flow and heat transfer problems in porous media are widely applied in drying, filtration, preservation of agricultural products, fluidized bed reactors, etc.
Today, a significant amount of work has been focused on the numerical simulation of the problems involving non-equilibrium heat and mass transfer. Especially, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to simulate such problems.
Recently, there have been several studies on the numerical modeling of diverse problems involving heat and mass transfer including drying. In this respect, heat and mass transport equations have been proposed to model different heat and mass transfer problems based on the thermal non-equilibrium assumption.
However, few studies have been proposed on non-equilibrium heat and mass transfer models for prediction of drying process using commercial software FLUENT.
Choe Song Gun, a section head at the Faculty of Heat Engineering, has developed a numerical formulation for modeling non-equilibrium heat and mass transfer inside porous media and solved the equations by using FLUENT. To achieve the objective, he reformed the moisture transport equation and energy transport equation for the solid matrix of porous media into a user-defined scalar equation type in FLUENT. In addition, he redefined the properties of solid and some terms of these equations in consideration of the coefficients and terms of UDS equation in FLUENT.
Then, he compared the calculation results and the experimental results in order to check the validity of the reformation of the model and equations. The deviations between them are less than 3% in heat transfer and less than 8% in mass transfer. The results show that his predictions follow the expected trends with respect to temperature and velocity at inlet.
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