Three-dimensional numerical analysis of water transfer in wood: determination of an expression for the effective mass diffusivity

Abstract

The objective of this article is to determine an expression for the effective mass diffusivity related to the description of wood drying using a diffusion model and experimental data. With this objective, a three-dimensional numerical solution of diffusion equation for the parallelepiped, with convective boundary condition, was used to describe the drying process. For the adopted diffusion model, the convective mass transfer coefficient h was considered constant. The effective mass diffusivity D was considered as a function of the local moisture content, and several expressions were tested to describe the process. To this end, the numerical solution was coupled to an optimizer based on the inverse method, which determines the process parameters D and h using an experimental dataset. For both temperatures of the drying air studied in this article (40 and 80 °C), the results obtained by considering the variable effective mass diffusivity are better than those obtained when considering such parameter with a value constant. In addition, with the results for D and h obtained by optimization, the drying kinetics was simulated with success.