Assessment of Pollutant Dispersal from a Power Station
Power stations take in large volumes of coolant water from nearby water reservoirs and discharge water at elevated temperatures. This thermal pollution can cause significant damage to sensitive marine ecosystems. This work programme aimed to use CFD techniques to assess the performance of a power station outflow manifold and configuration at a worst case condition. The local geographical relief and the geometry of the outflow manifolds were used to construct a CFD model of the system. The results from the analysis indicated that the excessive temperature increase is restricted to a region within approximately 70m of the outflow. In addition, the elevated temperature is concentrated at the tidal bay surface with the bay bed remaining largely unaffected.
