Institute for Process Engineering

Chair of thermal process engineering

Drying of porous media plays a decisive role in numerous natural and industrial systems. There has been a plethora of scientific research articles on modeling of the drying process in porous media. In this context, the historical but still open and crucial question is about the conditions under which a continuous model with effective material properties is suitable for modeling the transport phenomena in drying porous media.
One way to assess a continuous model is by the help of pore network simulations which can be seen as numerical experiments. The idea is to parametrize a continuous model with parameters that describe either fluid transport or equilibrium for a given porous medium. These parameters are determined from pore network simulations of the drying process. The parameters computed in this way have a clear physical meaning compared to those estimated by using either phenomenological approaches or inverse methods. In the frame of the international ANR / DFG "Drycap" project, the aim is to develop advanced continuous models for drying porous media through a combination of state of the art pore network modeling, pore network simulations and new experiments.