Modeling of Drying of Highly Shrinking Materials Using Hydrogels as an Example

Abstract

The work presents a model of convective drying of a highly shrinking material of cylindrical shape. To identify the effective diffusivity as a function of local temperature and moisture content the problem was solved as an inverse problem. A set of experimental data served for model validation. The optimization algorithms were used to solve PDE system and fit numerically obtained curves to the experimental data using the effective diffusivity as the only adjustable parameter.

Keywords:

• Diffusion coefficient
• Experiments
• Modeling
• Shrinkage