An Adaptive Approach to Finite Element Modeling of Drying Problems

ABSTRACT This study presents me development of an efficient adaptive finite element methodology for the analysis of drying problems. The propsed technique first uses an unified error estimator to assess the accuracy and reliability of the finite element solution. It then employs an automatic and adaptive finite element refinement strategy to reduce the errors to acceptable values. A new adaptive strategy applied to transient problems is also presented. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated by applying it to timber and clay brick drying problems. The estimated error agreed with the expected behavior: greater in regions of steeper gradients and lower in regions of smaller gradients. In addition, the proposed new adaptive strategy avoids unnecessary remeshing, i.e., remeshing when the error is decreasing with time at a reasonable rate.