Assessment of In-Flight Water Droplet Evaporation: The Contribution of Numerical Approximation Methods

The design of an irrigation system must limit the depletion of water due to the evaporation process, for social, environmental and economic reasons. In order to assess the evaporation it is important to fully understand how water, in the form of droplets, behaves during its flight. The state of the art of literature offers at the moment two main ways: the first one consists in adopting a classical viewpoint, using simplifying hypothesis to solve numerical approximation methods [1-12]. The second possibility is to adopt a quantum viewpoint, treating the water droplet as a quantum object [13]. By using this last method one can obtain a description as much as possible complete and doubtless the challenges associated with the quantum mechanics applied to droplets problems will continue to inspire progress in the years to come, but at the present time the fact that is impossible to find analytical solutions for quantum equations makes sometimes preferable to achieve the purpose through numerical approximations. In particular, the numerical approximation can be implemented via suitable codes and in this way a further step in literature has been taken using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) implementation [1416].