A study of the spontaneous air flow through a moving porous medium

When a layer of porous material such as the felt moves with respect to the surrounding air, the induced pressure difference will drive the air through the moving porous material. In many industrial applications including the paper machine drying pocket ventilation, this spontaneous air-flow phenomenon is significant and needs to be taken into consideration in the design process. This paper addresses the issues such as the velocity distribution along the moving felt and how the flow rate through the porous material correlates with the felt permeability and thickness. In particular, computational approaches are compared with existing experimental results and validated with an analytical model. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.