Author(s): Javier Garcia Alba; Cesar Alvarez Diaz; Andres Garcia Gomez; Jose A. Revilla Cortezon; Jose A. Juanes De La Pena
Linked Author(s): José A. Revilla Cortezón
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: The discharge of power plants, which use seawater for cooling processes, contains brine at a higher temperature than that of the environment. The study of the initial dilution of this kind of effluents, when discharged through a submarine outfall, can be done by means of different empirical or semi empirical models. All of them admit simplifications in order to reduce the mathematical effort to calculate the processes that occur around the diffusers. However, there are models that can describe the complexity of these phenomena by integrating the 3-D governing equations. This is the case of the Fluent model, which uses computational fluid dynamics techniques to calculate the initial dilution processes as well as the far-field dispersion. In this paper, the analysis of the Gijon Power Plant (North of Spain) discharge is described. The effluent of this facility is discharged into the open sea, with an irregular bottom bathymetry and near a breakwater, which induces a complex velocity field around the outfall. The comparison of FLUENT results with other models such as CORMIX has been also presented.
Year: 2009