This article presents a fully coupled heat and mass transfer model for convective drying of ceramic porous material. A two dimensional mathematical model that coupled mass, heat and gas transfer was developed and integrated with finite element method and the backward difference method to solve the spatial discretization and temporal discretization of the governing equations respectively. The numerical was computed using Skyline solver to capture highly nonlinear and transient process. Two different meshes (coarse and fine) were applied for the rectangular domain as a representative of the drying object. Results show two typical periods during drying namely the constant rate period (CRP) and falling rate period (FRP) which demonstrated a very small difference between both meshes. However, computational time was increased significantly for the finer mesh as compared to coarser mesh due to their high computational complexity. Thus, we can deduce that this model is sufficient to describe the mechanisms controlling the drying process in membrane fabrication.
