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

P Vidal-Lpez Universidad de Extremadura, Escuela de Ingenieras Agrarias de Badajoz, Avda. Adolfo Suarez s/n 06071 Badajoz, Spain . B. Martin-Gorriz, V. Martnez-Alvarez and B. Gallego-Elvira Universidad Politcnica de Cartagena, Escuela Tcnica Superior de Ingeniera Agronmica, Paseo Alfonso XIII, 48, 30203, Cartagena, Spain.

Keywords: mass transfer coefficient; heat and mass transfer analogy; FLUENT software. Abstract 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 tank evaporimeter. The evaporation rates calculated with the synthetic wind functions were in good agreement with hourly and daily evaporation measurements. The proposed CFDapproach is generalizable and 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. INTRODUCTION Free water surface evaporation is a major component of the hydrologic cycle, and its estimation is needed in many hydrological issues related to irrigation management and water resources planning. This study is focused on the numerical simulation of the evaporation of water in Class A pan with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The numerical work was supported by the experimental results of Class A pan evaporation presented in Martinez-Alvarez et al. (2005). The advantage of numerical methods is that they are cost effective compared to experimental methods. The main aim of the present study is to propose a CFD-based approach for generating synthetic wind functions of Class-A pan for specific environmental conditions. CFD finite volume method was applied since it can account for all variables and parameters involved in the heat transfer process. To assess the performance of the proposed method, the synthetic wind function was compared against the empiricallyderived wind function. The evaporation rates calculated were also compared with evaporation measurements. Additionally, the spatial distribution of the evaporation rate provided by CFD modelling is presented and analysed. METHODS The general expression of the mass transfer method for a freely evaporating water surface is:

(1) where E (mm day-1) is the evaporation rate, ew (kPa) is the saturation vapour pressure at the temperature of the water surface, Tw, ea (kPa) is the vapour pressure of the ambient air, at temperature Ta, and f (U) = a + bU is the wind function, assumed to be linearly dependent on wind speed measured at 2 m aboveground (U, m s-1). Following mass transfer theory (Incropera & De Witt, 1996) the evaporation rate for a water surface can be determined from the knowledge of the Sherwood number, the temperature and humidity of surrounding air and the water surface temperature: Sh D ( X s X a ) E= L (2) where the evaporation rate is expressed in kg m-2 s-1 or mm s-1, Xa and Xs are the water vapour mixing ratio of air and water surface (kg water/ kg dry air), D is the molecular diffusion coefficient of water vapour in air (m2 s-1), is the air density (kg m-3) and L is the characteristic length (m). The Sherwood number, Sh, is defined as follows: h L (3) Sh = m D where hm (ms-1) is the convective mass-transfer coefficient, equivalent to f(U) in Eq.1. In equation (3) the Sh number is computed according with a CFD convection heat transfer analysis and the heat-mass transfer analogy. The convective heat transfer between the air and the water surface can be expressed as follows: Nu k H s = hs (Tw Ta ) = (Tw Ta ) (4) L where Hs (W m-2) is the convective heat transferred (computed by CFD), hs (W m-2 K-1) is the convective heat transfer coefficient, Nu is the Nusselt number and k (W m-1 K-1) is the thermal conductivity of air. From Hs computed by CFD the relationship Nu/L can be computed and then the relationship Sh/L is estimated by means of the heat-mass analogy: Nu Sh = n n Pr L Sc L (5) If Sh/L value is introduced in Eq (3) and subsequently in Eq (2) the evaporation of the analysed water body (Class-A tank) is calculated.
CFD MODELLING Three-dimensional CFD was applied to heat transfer modelling. The numerical approach was based on the finite volume method, which was applied using Ansys Fluent 13 software. Three-dimensional conservation equations (momentum, mass and energy) described heat transfer for steady flows. The standard k model assuming isotropic turbulence was adopted to describe turbulent heat transport. A three-dimensional computational grid of the Class-A tank was generated using Ansys Workbench software. After testing different mesh densities, the calculations were based on a 303030 m domain which included the water surface, the tank walls and bottom with the insulating layer, and the surrounding soil. The cell size varies within the grid and the optimum size of cells was selected based on the attempt to balance computational time and quality of the simulated results in each region of the computational model.

E = f (U ) (ew ea ) = (a + bU )(ew ea )

The boundary conditions for both computational models were: Wall-type boundary conditions with steady temperature forced in the water surface. Wall-type boundary conditions with adiabatic behaviour were considered in the walls and bottom of the tank and the surrounding soil surface. The wind inlet and outlet were at atmospheric pressure, (i.e. null pressure gradient in the air at the limits of the computational domain). Symmetry conditions for the sky and the vertical limits of the computational domain.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Wind function Twelve scenarios were defined for modelling the Class-A tank wind function, which corresponded to the combination of Tw and Ta for hot and cold situations and six U values. Hot and cold situations were defined in order to represent the common temperature conditions for midday in summer (Tw = 25C and Ta = 35C) and at dawn in winter (Tw = 7C and Ta = 5C). These data were registered in a Class-A tank evaporimeter located at the Experimental Station of the University of Cartagena (southeastern Spain, 3735N, 059W, Martinez-Alvarez et al., 2005). The range of hourly wind speed during the four selected days was observed to vary from 0 to 6 m s-1; therefore U values ranging from 0.5 to 5.5 m s-1 every 1 m s-1 were considered. Fig. 1a shows the linear regression (R2 = 0.99) between hs values simulated for the Class-A tank (hsT,CFD) and wind speed. The synthetic function derived with CFD modelling (Eq. 6) was parallel and very close to the experimental one (hsT,EXP, Eq.7) reported by Martinez-Alvarez et al. (2005):

hsT,CFD = 4.263U + 1.385 hsT,EXP = 4.353U + 3.015

(6) (7)

where hsT,CFD and hsT,EXP are expressed in W m-2 K-1 and U in m s-1 respectively. The wind-dependent convective mass transfer coefficient f(U) was derived from the estimated hsT,CFD (Eqs. 6) considering the heat and mass transfer analogy (Eq. 5). The evaporation rate was calculated with Eq. 2, on hourly scale for the tank. Fig. 1.b presents the scatter plots of evaporation rate predictions vs. measurements for the tank. A high correlation (R2 = 0.931) was found, although it was observed that predictions slightly overestimated the evaporation rates in the lower range of values and underestimated in the higher range. It should be noted that there were negative hourly evaporation rates (i.e. condensation on water surface) observed in the tank. Although the condensation presence was predicted, the model underestimates the amount of condensation, especially when its measured values were higher.
Evaporation computation A dynamic model based on the energy balance is used to determine daily evaporation loss (E). The energy balance is formulated as:

E = Rn + Hs + G

[W m ]
2

Rn = S (1 a) + La (1 b) (Tw + 273,15) 4

Hs = hs(Ta Tw) T Twi G = C w z wi 1 t (8) Where is the latent heat of vaporization, E is the evaporation rate, Rn is the net radiation (Wm-2); a is the albedo of the water (0.06), La the incoming longwave radiation computed by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law with Brunt emissivity, b is the reflection coefficient of the long-wave radiation (0.03), is the water emissivity (0.97), is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant and Tw is the water temperature, which is computed numerically by the energy balance. Hs (W m-2) is the convective heat transferred, hs (W m-2 K-1) is the convective heat transfer coefficient computed by CFD as a function of the wind velocity, and Ta is the air temperature. G (W m-2) is the heat store, Cw is the heat capacity of water, z is the depth of the water body, Twi-1 the water temperature in the previous time step (hour), and Twi is the temperature of the water in the actual time step. Equations 8 depend on water temperature, Tw. The model operates at a daily time step iterating the water temperature until the equilibrium condition of the energy balance is met. Once the target temperature is found, all terms of Evaporation is computed with Eq.2 with the CFD-derived wind function. To solve the energy balance (Eq. 8) the experimental input data were hourly values of solar radiation, Ta, U and the relative humidity. An initial measure/estimate of the water temperature needs to be provided. This is an important difference with Martinez-Alvarez et al. (2005) approach in which the experimental temperature of the water was used in each step. With all these parameters and data, the energy balance was solved by a subroutine in Matlab sotware using an iterative algorithm that estimates water temperature in each time step (Gallego-Elvira et al. 2010). With this water temperature the program computes also the hourly evaporation. The model was applied for four days (the same days as in Martinez-Alvarez et al. 2005) and the results are compared with previous modelling results in Fig 2. Fig. 2 shows the good agreement between results by CFD and transient modelling with the evaporation defined by experimental wind-functions in Martnez-Alvarez et al. (2005).
Spatial distribution of evaporation CFD modelling also provided additional analysis capabilities. If the heat and mass transfer analogy is assumed in each face element of the water surface, the spatial distribution of evaporation over the water body can be analyzed. For that purpose, the characteristic length of the water body in Eq. 2 (L) should be replaced by the characteristic length corresponding to the location of each element (x). Fig. 3a presents a three-dimensional perspective of the hourly evaporation rate in the Class-A tank water surface for the meteorological conditions on 4/08/2002 at midday. This day was selected since it presented the maximum evaporation rate of dataset. For a given wind direction, the evaporation rate increased rapidly from the windward edge of the pan, reaching the maximum value near this edge. The rate decreases progressively towards the leeward pan edge, where the value was about 55% of the maximum rate. This behaviour is due to the wind movement over the tank. Fig. 3b shows the wind velocity

vectors in a vertical plane parallel to the wind direction. It can be observed that when the wind passes over the windward edge of the pan a whirlwind is formed. The maximum evaporation rate is produced in the place where the whirlwind projects a vertical air flow on the water surface, which is the place with higher turbulence and air renewal.
CONCLUSIONS The application of CFD to water bodies evaporation modelling looks promising, in particular the fact that it can provide extra information, such us the spatial distribution of water surface temperature and evaporation rate. This information allows the analysis of border and advection effects. Based on CFD modelling, a novel approach has been proposed to determine the convective mass-transfer coefficient or wind function for estimating evaporation of water bodies. Results show that the synthetic wind functions are very close to the ones empirically derived. The CFD-derived estimations for four different days showed very good agreement with experimental data, similar to those obtained with experimental wind functions. The main advantage of this procedure is that only standard meteorological data are required. The proposed methodology is easily applicable, generalizable and cost effective. AKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors acknowledge the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain for the financial support through the project AGL2010-15001 (co-financed by FEDER). Literature Cited Incropera FP and DeWitt DP. 1996. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer. (Fourth ed.). John Wiley & Sons. New York. Gallego-Elvira B, Baille A, Martn-Grriz B and Martnez-Alvarez V. 2010. Energy balance and evaporation loss of an agricultural reservoir in a semi-arid climate (southeastern Spain). Hydrological Processes 24: 758766. Martinez-Alvarez V., Molina Martinez J.M., Gonzlez-Real M.M. and Baille A 2005. Simulacin de la evaporacin horaria a partir de los datos meteorolgicos Ingeniera del Agua 12-1: 39-51. In Spanish. Figures
30
Serie3 hsT,EXP Lineal ( CFD hs) Experimental hs Lineal (Serie3)

E predicted (mm h-1 or mm d-1)

hh with CFD s sT.CFD

a) Tank Pana)

1.2 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 -0.2

b) a) Tank

hs (Wm-2K-1)

20

10

y = 4,262x + 1,384 2 R = 0,993

y = 0.892x + 0.033 R = 0.931

0 0 2 4 6

-0.2

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

U (ms )

-1

E measured (mm h-1)

Fig. 1.a) Experimental and CFD-derived wind functions (hsT,EXP and hsT,CFD) in the tank and b) Linear regression between measured and predicted evaporation rates.

500 400 Wm-2

Wm-2

300 200 100 0 -100 01:00 06:00 11:00 Local time E CFD E observed E Martinez-Alvarez et al. 2005 16:00 21:00

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 -100 01:00 06:00 11:00 Local time 16:00 21:00

E CFD

E obserbed

E Martinez-Alvarez et al. 2005

500 400 Wm-2 300 200 100 0 -100 01:00 06:00 11:00 16:00 Local time 21:00
Wm2

400 300 200 100 0 -100 01:00 06:00 11:00 Local time 16:00 21:00

E CFD

E obserbed

E Martinez-Alvarez et al 2005

E CFD

E obserbed

E Martinez-Alvarez et al 2005

Fig 2. Hourly trend of the observed and predicted values of the evaporation rate (a) 1May-2003, (b) 4-Aug-2002, (c) 17-Oct-2002, (d) 7-Jan-2003.

6.66e+00
1.05e+03 9.96e+02 9.44e+02 8.91e+02 8.39e+02 7.86e+02 7.34e+02 6.82e+02 6.29e+02 5.77e+02 5.24e+02 4.72e+02 4.19e+02 3.67e+02 3.15e+02 2.62e+02 2.10e+02 1.57e+02 1.05e+02 5.24e+01 0.00e+00

a) E (Wm-2) in the Class-A tank

6.33e+00 5.99e+00 5.66e+00 5.33e+00 5.00e+00 4.67e+00 4.34e+00 4.00e+00 3.67e+00 3.34e+00 3.01e+00 2.68e+00 2.35e+00 2.01e+00 1.68e+00 1.35e+00 1.02e+00

Y Z X

a) E (Wm-2) in the Class-A tank

b) U(ms-2) in the Class-A tank

Fig 3. CFD modelling details. a) Three-dimensional perspective of the hourly evaporation rate in the Class-A tank water surface under the specific meteorological conditions on the 4th of August midday. b) Wind velocity vectors in a vertical plane parallel to the wind direction for the previous situation (Fig. 3a) in the Class-A tank.