Modelling of Saltwater Evaporation using WAIV

Abstract

Indonesia as a country, which has the second longest coastline in the world, has a big opportunity to improve its salt production. The productivity of salt production in Indonesia from 2011 to 2014 was around 67, 92, 40, and 90 tons/ha/year, respectively. This low productivity was mainly due to the method of salt production used, which was very traditional and depended mainly on the availability of solar energy for evaporation. The longer the dry season was, the higher the salt production would be in that year, and vice versa. Since the performance of evaporation process holds the key to the improvement of productivity of salt production, it is important to study a method that can speed up the evaporation process in the salt production. One of the recent methods that can be used to achieve that purpose is the Wind Aided Intensified Evaporation (WAIV) process. In this study, a model for saltwater evaporation in a WAIV unit using Harbeck equation is proposed. Two set of data for saltwater evaporation in a WAIV unit was extracted from literature. The first set of data was used to obtain the parameters of Harbeck equation by minimizing the sum of error squares of the cumulative evaporation rate in a WAIV unit compared to its model. The second set of data was used to validate the model. It is found that the proposed model can estimate the evaporation rate in a WAIV unit based on the surrounding climate data reasonably well.