Coupled Integral Equations Approach in the Solution of Luikov Equations with Microwave Effect

The objective of this study was to present a mathematical modeling and solution approach for the drying process of spheroidal solids with the application of microwaves in capillary porous media based on Luikov equations, which was composed of a system of linear and coupled partial differential equations arising from the energy, mass and pressure balances inside the solid matrix. Additionally, the power generation term from the application of microwaves was added to this differential system. The solution to this problem was achieved through a Coupled Integral Equations Approach (CIEA), whose objective was the transformation of the initial PDE system into an ODEs one. A computer code was developed in the FORTRAN 90/95 programming language, which used the subroutine IVPAG from the IMSL library to solve the system of ODEs from the application of the CIEA. The results obtained were compared with other previously reported results in the literature to verify the methodology and subsequently showed satisfactory agreement with those results.