This work is motivated by the problem of restraining temperature escalation inside a porous heat releasing media submerged in a pool of liquid coolant. When coolant temperature reaches saturation, boiling begins in the bulk of the porous bed, with void generation rate determined by the heating power. Amount of void determines hydrostatic pressure difference that drives natural circulation of two-phase flow through the porous material. At a certain critical value of the heat release rate, the driving head cannot overcome drag of the two phase porous media flow, which results in complete evaporation of coolant in some zone. Temperature of material in the dry zone increases significantly due to deterioration of heat exchange with single phase vapor flow in comparison with boiling flow heat transfer. The paper considers the problem of determining the critical conditions for onset of dryout in a heat-releasing porous bed of an arbitrary shape. The well-known one-dimensional problem for a flat top-flooded bed is revisited, and the functional form of the dryout boundary (expressed as the dryout heat flux, DHF) is derived using non-dimensional parameters. Asymptotic behavior of the solution is analyzed, and, by the method of asymptotic interpolation, a surrogate model is proposed consisting of three single-argument, non-dimensional functions. It is shown that such a model provides acceptable accuracy even in the cases where complete similarity of solutions is not achieved. The results obtained provide important insights into the physics of the problem, reduce the number of free parameters, and enable fast evaluation of dryout conditions without the need of numerical solution of algebraic equations involved in the exact formulation. The ultimate goal of the surrogate model development, i.e. its application to multidimensional configurations, is discussed. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.