Several methods quantify soil evaporation by measuring vertical moisture flux or by recording change in mass of a soil specimen. These methods conventionally consider a non-deformable soil behaviour. However, shrinkage is the mechanical consequence of a plastic soil to evaporation reducing the area over which evaporation can occur. For this reason, it is imperative to take into account the gradual densification of the soil sample during evaporation in order to minimize possible measurement errors originating from the way, how the physical conditions are simulated. To address this challenge, an improved method proposed in this paper takes into account two aspects of soil deformation, which together have an influence on the total evaporation: (1) the reduced top soil surface due to radial shrinkage and (2) additional evaporation from the exposed side soil surface when the sample detaches from the sample holder. Four experiments with kaolin have been conducted in the laboratory to explore the effect of these two aspects through the proposed methodology. In the tests conducted, considering the changes in the area of the top soil surface and avoiding the additional evaporation from the exposed side surface significantly improved the accuracy of evaporation quantification by 25.
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