A new method for taking into account mass loss due to evaporation in rectangular pool geometries is presented. In the latter, the free surface is approximated by a free-slip upper boundary and its descend is attributed pro- portionally to all cells by re-meshing the grid at each time-step. This allows to avoid any field changes at the boundaries whilst distributing the error (due to discretization) along the height. This remeshing procedure, although apparently simple, involves a change in the temporal discretization of our various equations. This method, which allows mass transfer across an interface to be taken into account, is combined with the model presented by Hay et al. 1, which considers the heat exchanges taking place at the interface. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection in water pools driven by evaporation across the free surface are performed thanks to this dynamic and inhomogeneous evaporation model. The predicted evaporative and convective heat losses are employed to assign a non-zero Neumann condition for the temperature 1 while the predicted evaporative mass flux is used to dynamically remesh the computational domain. To begin with, we outline the heat transfer model for evaporation of 1 and our remeshing procedure to take into account the mass loss. We then present a validation and verification procedure against analytical, experimental and numerical results. Finaly, we analyze the flow topology, including the structure and properties of the Large Scale Circulation, and discuss the turbulence statistics of the flow field.
Marichal et al. (Wed,) studied this question.