Assessment of the evaporation correlations performance

International audienceWhen performing a risk analysis on industrial facilities, various hazardous scénarios must be imagined. Thèse scénarios may lead to the formation of a toxic or flammable gas cloud and it is therefore important to détermine precisely the pool evaporation so as to estimate the size and the concentration of the cloud. Currently, différent mass transfer evaporation corrélations are used to quantify the evaporation rate. Some of them let easily calculate the evaporation rate only taking into account few parameters as the saturated vapour pressure, the liquid température, the substance molecular weight, the air wind velocity and the evaporation area. However, when thèse corrélations are compared each other on a specified case, the evaporation rate results obtained are not necessary similar. A significant gap may be even noted between them. This point lets think that the use of thèse tools should be done with caution