Using water curtain system to forced mitigate ammonia vapor cloud has been proven to be an effective measure. Currently, no engineering guidelines for designing an effective water curtain system are available, due to lack of understanding of complex interactions between ammonia vapor cloud and water droplets, especially the understanding of ammonia absorption into water droplets. This paper presents numerical calculations to reproduce the continuous ammonia release dispersion with and without the mitigating influence of a downwind water curtain using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software ANSYS Fluent 14.0. The turbulence models k-epsilon and RNG were used to simulate the ammonia cloud dispersion without downwind water curtain. The simulated results were compared with literature using the statistical performance indicators. The RNG model represents better agreement with the experimental data and the k-epsilon model generates a slightly lesser result. The RNG model coupled with Lagrangian discrete phase model (DPM) was used to simulate the dilution effectiveness of the water curtain system. The ammonia absorption was taken into account by means of user-defined functions (UDF). The simulated effectiveness of water curtains has good agreements with the experimental results. The effectiveness of water mitigation system with and without the ammonia absorption was compared. The results display that the effectiveness mainly depends on the strong air entrainment enhanced by water droplets movement and the ammonia absorption also enhances the effectiveness of water curtain mitigation system. The study indicates that the CFD code can be satisfactorily applied in design criteria for an effective mitigation system. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.