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Revisiting Salvucci’s Semi-analytical Solution for Bare Soil Evaporation with New Consideration of Vapour Diffusion and Film Flow

Mathias, Simon A.; Sander, Graham C.; Leung, Jessica; Newall, Samuel R.

Revisiting Salvucci’s Semi-analytical Solution for Bare Soil Evaporation with New Consideration of Vapour Diffusion and Film Flow Thumbnail


Authors

Graham C. Sander

Jessica Leung

Samuel R. Newall



Abstract

Bare soil evaporation is controlled by a combination of capillary flow, vapour diffusion and film flow. Relevant analytical solutions mostly assume horizontal flow conditions and ignore gravitational effects. Salvucci (1997) provided a rare example of a semi-analytical solution for vertical bare soil evaporation. However, they did not explicitly represent vapour diffusion and film flow, which are likely to account for a significant proportion of total flow during vertical evaporation from soils. Vapour diffusion and film flow can be incorporated via Salvucci’s desorptivity parameter, which represents the proportionality constant relating Stage 2 cumulative evaporation to the square root of time under horizontal flow conditions. The objective of this article is to implement vapour diffusion and film flow within Salvucci’s semi-analytical solution and test its performance by comparison with isothermal numerical simulation and relevant experimental data. The following important conclusions are drawn. Analytical solutions that assume horizontal flow conditions are inadequate for understanding vertical evaporation problems because they overestimate evaporation rates and mostly predict vapour diffusion and film flow to be of negligible influence. Salvucci’s semi-analytical solution is effective at predicting the order-of-magnitude reduction in evaporation caused by gravitational effects. However, it is unable to identify the correct importance of vapour diffusion and film flow because these processes can only be represented through its desorptivity parameter.

Citation

Mathias, S. A., Sander, G. C., Leung, J., & Newall, S. R. (2023). Revisiting Salvucci’s Semi-analytical Solution for Bare Soil Evaporation with New Consideration of Vapour Diffusion and Film Flow. Transport in Porous Media, 147(2), 463-493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-023-01917-5

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 8, 2023
Online Publication Date Feb 25, 2023
Publication Date 2023-03
Deposit Date Feb 27, 2023
Publicly Available Date May 30, 2023
Journal Transport in Porous Media
Print ISSN 0169-3913
Electronic ISSN 1573-1634
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 147
Issue 2
Pages 463-493
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-023-01917-5
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1180028

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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