Examining the Suitability of the Reaction Engineering Approach (REA) to Modeling Local Evaporation/Condensation Rates of Materials with Various Thicknesses

The reaction engineering approach (REA) is examined here to investigate its suitability as the local evaporation rate to be used in multiphase drying. For this purpose, REA is first implemented to model the convective drying of materials with various thicknesses. The relative activation energy, as the fingerprint of REA, generated from one size of a material is used to model the convective drying of the same material with different thicknesses. Because the results indicate that REA parameters can model the drying of materials with various thicknesses, REA can be scaled down to describe the local evaporation rate (at the microscale as affected by local composition and temperature). The relative activation energy is used to describe the global drying rate in modeling the local evaporation rate. REA is combined with a system of equations of conservation of heat and mass transfer in order to yield the spatial reaction engineering approach (S-REA) as a nonequilibrium multiphase drying model. By using S-REA, the spatial profiles of moisture content, concentration of water vapor, temperature, and local evaporation rate can be generated, which can assist in comprehending the transport phenomena.