Evaporation under cavity flow: laser speckle correlation of the wind velocity above the liquid surface

One of the major accident scenarios in industrial safety deals with liquid pool evaporation consequent to a tank rupture. Numerous previous studies have been performed and several correlations are available in the literature. It appears that all of the correlations are strongly dependent on wind velocity but have nevertheless been all created under a boundary layer flow above the pool. However, industrial safety bunds do not allow such a profile because of obstacles and so cavity flows may occur. For such a configuration, is it then possible to describe the evaporation phenomena thanks to correlations in the literature? Experiments involving evaporation under this configuration have thus been performed in this work. Particular care is devoted to the wind profile measurement as the wind velocity is one of the main parameters. Digital speckle correlation insures high accuracy and good spatial resolution. We used a double pulse YAG laser (200mJ, 15Hz at 532 nm) with a high resolution double frame camera (2048 pixel x 2048 pixels, 15Hz). The experiments involve 200 liters (200L) of liquid (acetone and water) in a 58 cm diameter pool. The pool is located in the wind tunnel facility. The study presents 2 different wind velocities (2m.s-1 and 4m.s-1) and four different dike step heights (0 cm, 3 cm, 6 cm and 10 cm). Displacement vector maps are obtained after adaptative correlation and related processing. The final results are also crossed with IR measurements and open new fields of investigation that will be discussed.