Formation of a hard surface layer during drying of a heated porous media

TL;DR

This study investigates the formation of a surface hardening crust during drying of heated porous media, revealing the role of trapped water, surface tension, and heat flux in crust properties and thickness.

Contribution

It introduces the phenomenon of crust formation during drying under IR heating, with detailed analysis of water trapping, crust thickness, and strength variations across different particle types.

Findings

Crusts have higher strength due to surface tension and trapped water.

Crust thickness correlates with heat flux via a power law.

Crust strength varies with particle hydrophilicity and temperature.

Abstract

We report surface hardening or crust formation, unlike caking, during drying when a confined porous medium was heated from above using IR radiation. These crusts have higher strength than their closest counterparts such as sandcastles and mud-peels which essentially are clusters of partially wet porous medium. Observed higher strength of the crusts is mostly due to surface tension between the solid particles which are connected by liquid bridges (connate water). Qualitative (FTIR) and quantitative (TGA) measurements confirm the presence of trapped water within the crust. Amount of the trapped water was ~1.5% (this is about 10 times higher than in the samples with caking) which was confirmed using SEM images. Further, in the fixed particle sizes case, the crust thickness varied slightly (10-20 particle diameters only for cases with external heating) while with the natural sand whole porous column was crusted; surprisingly, crust was also found with the hydrophobic glass beads. Fluorescein dye visualization technique was used to determine the crust thickness. We give a power law relation between the crust thickness and the incident heat flux for various particle sizes. The strength of the crust decreases drastically with increasing hydrophilic spheres diameter while it increases with higher surface temperature.