The pressure drop in a porous material layer during combustion

During the combustion of a porous material layer, a manometer, which is attached to the cold end of the charge, records at the bottom of the layer a pressure reduction, which was discovered more than 20 years ago but which remains essentially unexplained up to the present. It is experimentally shown that this effect is similar to the pressure change in the cavities when a light gas (helium, hydrogen) diffuses from (or to) them under isothermal conditions and that it increases during the combustion mainly due to the accompanying Stefan type flow, and probably also as a result of the thermal diffusion. A pressure drop in the cavities is evidently made possible also by the pressure reduction in the flame which follows from the Hugoniot adiabatic theory.