Droplet evaporation from porous surfaces; model validation from field and wind tunnel experiments for sand and concrete

The evaporation model of Roberts and Griffiths (1995 Atmospheric Environment 29, 1307–1317) has been subjected to an extensive validation exercise based on a major campaign of field experiments on evaporation from surfaces composed of sand and of concrete. This complements the previous validation which was limited to wind tunnel experiments on sand surfaces. Additionally, the validation using wind tunnel data has been extended to include concrete surfaces. The model describes the constant-rate and falling-rate periods that characterise evaporation from porous media. During the constant-rate period, the evaporation is solely determined by the vapour transport rate into the air. During the falling-rate period, the process in the porous medium is modelled as a receding evaporation front, the overall evaporation rate being determined by the combined effects of vapour transport through the pore network and subsequently into the air. The field trials programme was conducted at sites in the USA and the UK, and examined the evaporation of diethyl malonate droplets from sand and concrete surfaces. Vapour concentrations at several heights in the plume were measured at the centre of a 1 m radius annular source (of width 10 cm) contaminated by uniformly sized droplets (2.4 or 4.1 mm in diameter), key meteorological data being measured at the same time. The evaporation was quantified by coupling concentration and wind speed data. In all, 22 trials were performed on sand and concrete; a further 8 were performed on non-porous surfaces (aluminium foil and slate) as references. The model performance was evaluated against the experimental data in terms of two quantities, the initial evaporation rate of the embedded droplets, and the mass-fraction remaining in the substrate at intervals over the evaporation episode. Overall, the model performance was best in the case of the field experiments for concrete, and the wind tunnel experiments for sand; the performance for wind tunnel experiments for concrete was reasonably good; in the case of the field experiments for sand there was significant underprediction of evaporation rates, though the trends with the determining variables were well predicted.