Evaporation in Porous Media with Large Evaporation Rates
Application ID: 33731
Evaporation in porous media is an important process in the food and paper industries, among others. Many physical effects must be considered: fluid flow, heat transfer, and transport of participating fluids and gases. All of these effects are strongly coupled and predefined interfaces can be used to model these effects with the Heat Transfer Module.
This tutorial model describes an arbitrary case of drying a wet porous object using laminar air flow. The air is dehumidified at the inlet to the porous object where its moisture content increases as it flows through the porous medium. The model focuses on the steps required to implement simulate multiphase flow in porous media, in the Heat Transfer Module, together with the evaporation of the liquid to a gaseous phase. Water saturation in the porous medium is computed over time.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products:
however, additional products may be required to completely define and model it. Furthermore, this example may also be defined and modeled using components from the following product combinations:
- COMSOL Multiphysics® and
- either the Heat Transfer Module, or Porous Media Flow Module and
- either the Battery Design Module, CFD Module, Chemical Reaction Engineering Module, Corrosion Module, Electrochemistry Module, Electrodeposition Module, Fuel Cell & Electrolyzer Module, Microfluidics Module, Polymer Flow Module, Porous Media Flow Module, or Subsurface Flow Module
The combination of COMSOL® products required to model your application depends on several factors and may include boundary conditions, material properties, physics interfaces, and part libraries. Particular functionality may be common to several products. To determine the right combination of products for your modeling needs, review the Specification Chart and make use of a free evaluation license. The COMSOL Sales and Support teams are available for answering any questions you may have regarding this.