Modeling of coupled heat and mass transfer during drying of tropical woods

Abstract

We have developed a model on drying of two tropical woods of ayous (Triplochiton Scleroxylon) and frake (Terminalia Superba) coming from Cameroon forests. Some thermophysical parameters used in the model were experimentally obtained in this work while the remaining properties were from literature. A comparison is doing between numerical results of our model, these given by the Luikov’s model and experimental data. Numerical simulation results from the developed model give close agreement with experimental results. We note that Luikov’s model not gives a satisfaction results in the non-hygroscopic domain in the case of frake. The present model can be used to explain the drying phenomenon of these two tropical species and can be applied to others species when necessary thermophysical parameters of these species are known. In a future work, it is important to integrate the influence of anatomical direction on our numerical and experimental results.