CFD simulation of water evaporation in class-A pan with a transient analysis

A CFD-based methodology is proposed to derive convective mass-transfer coefficients (wind functions) which are required for estimating evaporation of water bodies with the mass-transfer method. The CFD-derived wind functions were very similar to those empirically derived from a Class-A pan evaporimeter. The evaporation rates calculated with the synthetic wind functions were in good agreement with hourly and daily evaporation measurements. The proposed CFDapproach can be generalised and is cost effective, since it has low input data requirements. Besides, it provides the additional capability of modelling the spatial distribution of the evaporation rate over the water surface. Although the application of CFD to water bodies evaporation modelling is still in the making it looks very promising.