Temperature and moisture distributions in a moist spherical capillary-porous body - A new approach

A novel technique, which is a combination of the Laplace transform and matr ix calculus, is employed to obtain the exact solutions of the linearized Lu ikov system of coupled heat and moisture transport equations in a spherical capillary porous body addressed to specified initial and boundary conditio ns. It is shown that under certain restrictions, in the case of convective- type boundary conditions, the transcendental equation yields a countable nu mber of complex conjugate roots. Here, a new computational scheme is employ ed, which evaluates real as well as a countable number of pairs of complex conjugate roots. A set of benchmark results is generated for the Luikov dry ing model, and in a way better than the alternative solutions proposed by L obo er al. [19] for linear problems. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Song, Ltd.