As a kind of fibre, regular textile fabric is considered a porous medium composed of a lot of thread. Thread itself is also a porous medium. In other words, regular textile fabric corresponds to a large-pore porous medium composed of small-pore matrix (thread).
Heat and mass transfer problems in porous media have been studied in two categories: equilibrium and non-equilibrium. Some studies focused on the numerical simulation of the problems involving non-equilibrium heat and mass transfer.
Choe Song Gun, a section head at the Faculty of Thermal Engineering, has developed a mathematical model of fluid flow and non-equilibrium heat and mass transfer in porous media.
First, he presented governing equations for fluid, solid and porous regions and he paid special attention to moisture transfer from porous media to the surrounding moist air flow. Then, he described a CFD solution approach for spatially distributed temperature and moisture content in regular textile fabric during drying. User-Defined Scalar (UDS) and User-Defined Function (UDF) were used.
Finally, he conducted an unsteady simulation of drying of porous media placed in the 2D channel by using FLUENT, and analysed the effects of temperature and velocity at the inlet and the porosity and diffusion coefficient of porous media on drying.
For more information, please refer to his paper “CFD Simulation of Convective Drying of Regular Dual Porosity Media Under Local Non-Equilibrium” in “Proceedings of KUTIC-2025”.