Two-dimensional heat and mass transfer during drying of deformable media

Drying is an essential step in many production and treatment processes. The control of the dry product quality is more and more required in order to ensure effective use or handling of the material. The aim of this study is to develop a two-dimensional drying model which takes into account heat and mass transfer and the accompanying deformation of the dried material. The model tries to be relatively simple but sufficiently complete in order to predict and analyze the spatio-temporal distribution of the temperature, the moisture and the solid displacement during the process. The product was considered as a two-phases, homogeneous, hygroscopic, isotropic and highly shrinkable medium. The model was solved numerically by a finite difference method. The simulation allowed the obtention of the time and space evolutions of several parameters such as product temperature, moisture content and solid displacement.