Study of the Drying Behavior of Resorcinol Formaldehyde Hydrogels : Experimental Investigation and Numerical Framework

In this paper, we present the method used to investigate the drying behavior of the Resorcinol (R) formaldehyde (F) hydrogels and the tools needed for its numerical modeling. First, the studied material is introduced. Then the experiments are briefly presented and some preliminary results are given. Drying tests have been first carried out to characterize the drying kinetics of RF hydrogels. The experiments are used to calibrate the transfer parameters of a convective drying law based on the boundary layer model [Gerard et al. (2010)]. Ultimately, the goal is to model the Hydromechanical behavior of the RF gels during drying and predict crack genesis. To do so, a thermohydro- mechanical coupled model including a tensile failure criterion is suggested. The tensile failure criterion is based on the existence of a tension cut-off expressed in terms of a minimum mean effective stress.