Influence of heating mode on drying behavior of capillary porous media: Pore scale modeling

Invasion percolation (IP) rules under non-isothermal conditions are applied to model the pore-scale events occurring during drying of capillary porous media, namely displacement of immiscible phases and cluster formation. A saturated two-dimensional network with a bimodal pore size distribution is dried by applying two different beat transfer boundary conditions; one corresponds to convective drying and the other to less resistive contact drying. Simulated macroscopic drying behavior is presented in conjunction with freely evolved microscopic temperature fields and phase distributions for both heating modes. Convective heating exhibits similar invasion patterns as those in isothermal simulations: both are dominated by the spatial distribution of pore radii. However, in contact heating, temperature dependency of surface tension produces significantly different invasion patterns. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.