Development of A Darcy-flow model applied to simulate the drying of shrinking media

a mathematical model is developed to describe the coupling between heat, mass, and momentum transfers and is applied to simulate the drying of saturated and shrinking media. this model is called "the darcy-flow model", which is based on the fact that the liquid flow is induced by a pressure gradient. the main novelties of the model are that firstly no phenomenological law need be introduced by keeping solid mass conservation and solid volume conservation together and secondly we use the effective stresses notion strongly coupling mechanical behaviour with mass transport. the analysis is limited to the preheating and the constant rate drying periods because shrinkage occurs during these two periods for most materials. our purpose is to simulate the drying process and to compare the results of the simulations and the experiments done on clay material to demonstrate the consistency of the model developed. one of the important conclusions is that is no correlation between moisture flow and moisture gradient.