Evaporation of water can be considered an essential part of the hydrological cycle. It is important for many technological applications such as industrial cooling towers, air conditioning, solid material drying, distillation, and liquid film cooling. Moreover, the interfacial convection caused by the density gradient belongs to Rayleigh convection, which plays an important role in the evaporation process by means of intensifying heat and mass transfer, as in an isopropanol‒water system. In addition, natural convection, which can be defined as a buoyancy-driven flow, is important in astrophysics, geophysics, and numerous engineering applications such as solar energy systems, cooling of electrical equipment, ventilation, and passive cooling in nuclear power plants. In the current work, an experimental study along with a numerical simulation investigation of free water surface evaporation in case of natural convection is carried out. First, an experiment is conducted to predict Sherwood‒Rayleigh correlation for free water surface evaporation in case of natural convection in the range of 1.4×109 a

This work aims to perform an experiment in the laboratory and investigate the effect of the wave steepness, airflow velocity, air relative humidity, air temperature, and water surface temperature on the evaporation rate from still and wavy water surface. In this investigation, the experimental results are used to quantify an evaporation rate from a still and wavy water surface under different convection regimes that are free, mixed, and forced convection under turbulent airflow conditions. Empirical correlations are also derived using the experimental results based on modified Dalton's law and Similarity method (analogy between mass and heat transfer equation). In this experiment, the applicability of two of these approaches (similarity theory and Dalton's law) to predict the evaporation models are investigated. The empirical correlations are obtained in this experiment for natural, mixed, and forced convection under turbulent airflow conditions based on modified Dalton's law and are verified by comparing with 12 empirical correlations found in the literature. The laboratory measurements are made using the large wave tank-wind tunnel combination in which both wind speed and wave parameters are controlled.