W. Jomaa et O. Baixeras, DISCONTINUOUS VACUUM DRYING OF OAK WOOD - MODELING AND EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS, Drying technology, 15(9), 1997, pp. 2129-2144
Vacuum drying and especially discontinuous vacuum drying is a very att
ractive process for such a wood as oak, because of a reduced drying ti
me and a high quality of the final product. In this paper, a model des
cribing heat, mass and momentum transfer in a capillary porous and hyg
roscopic medium under vacuum drying with no external heating agent (th
e material is pre-heated during a convective phase), is presented. The
choice of the following three independent unknowns, moisture content,
enthalpy and dry air density, leads to a fully well described problem
where the effect of gaseous pressure inside the material is taken int
o account. A new formulation of the boundary conditions and its numeri
cal resolution are validated by experimental results.