Optimal and Experimental Analysis of Electrohydrodynamic Enhancement of Water Evaporation

Abstract

The paper investigates the EHD effect on the evaporating rate of the water surfaces by numerical and experimental methods. Two-dimensional turbulent forced convection channel flow is theoretically analyzed. Parametric evaluation including the applied voltage, electrode location is executed in details. The related optimization of the electrode pitch and height for specified input voltage is investigated numerically along with a simplified conjugated-gradient method (SCGM). The results show the EHD effect on the evaporating rate is increased with increase of voltage and electrode pitch and decrease of electrode height. In addition, based on the per unit power consumption, the best mass transfer performance is obtained at the optimal electrode location for each input voltage case. At last, the numerical results get a good consistency with the experiment within a discrepancy of 27%.