Analysis of Evaporation Data from an Enclosed Pond Ventilated by Solar Chimney

Abstract

Water removal from industrial effluent streams, salt cultivation farms, biodiesel conversion process from microalgae, and food drying by using pond evaporation with a higher rate of mass flux can be considered as an economical and energy saving scheme. The objective of this study is to utilize a method of enhancing the pond natural evaporation rate to improve the sustainability of industrial operations. In this study, canopied ventilation technology was employed to enhance the pond evaporation. This technology caused the natural draft enhancement by installing a wire mesh on the chimney. The unit consists of a solar irradiated solid wall chimney installed on the evaporation pan as a means to increase the evaporation rate of existing water body. Experiments were conducted in square pan at the same size as class-A pan in three configurations. The experimental result showed that the evaporation flux from configuration YY (Solar chimney with wire mesh) averaged at 13 per cent more than configuration NN (Open Pond) and at 20 per cent more than configuration YN(Solar chimney without wire mesh). Counter to intuition, for configuration YN the evaporation averaged at 6 per cent lower than the evaporation from the open pond configuration. The pan evaporation flux was found to be predicted satisfactorily by the Rayner[5] evaporation model showing it is able to aggregate reasonably the effect of changing characteristics of the three configurations in terms of net radiation, vapor pressure deficit and natural ventilation draft.