Effects of porosity on heat and mass transfer in a granular adsorbent bed

Abstract

In the present study, the mechanism of heat and mass transfer in an annulus adsorbent is handled. The heat and mass transfer equations for the adsorbent bed and the mass balance equation for the adsorbent granules are numerically solved to obtain the distributions of temperature, pressure, adsorptive density and adsorbate concentration in the adsorbent bed. The study is performed for the silica gel–water pair and for three different values of porosity as 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3. The distributions of temperature and adsorbate concentration are considerably influenced from the bed porosity. The adsorption period increases with the increase of the porosity value. The porosity affects the pressure and adsorptive density distributions at the beginning of the process and after a relatively short time, the averages of these dependent variables approach to the final equilibrium state.