Modeling of Brine Discharge from Desalination-Power plant in Bandar Abbas to Reach an Optimum Outfall Design

Long-term desalination is considered as a very expensive technology for countries and regions with a dry climate and low rainfall, except for rich countries with great deals of energy resources.Recent progress indesalination technology and severe lack of surface water resources and decrease in ground waterresources has increased use of desalination plants. Along with this, using desalination plant in southern regions of Iran is paid lot of attention due to their adjacency with Persian Gulf. However, using desalinationplant will lead concentrated effluent that is referred to as brine or brine-blow down. The brineis generally more salty than seawater and its temperature is higher than ambient which results in undesirable effects on marine ecosystems. Therefore, the brine should be discharged in away that induce minimum effect on the discharge ambient. In Bandar Abbas power plant development plan, by addingtwo units to the existing plant, the amount of the inletseawater into the desalination plant has increasedfrom 50 m3/s to 75 m3/s for which the heated effluent of them will increase up to 0.15 m3/s. In this research, simulation of brine plume dispersion has been considered, regarding to the heated effluent from Bandar Abbas thermal power plant and an optimum outfall design different scenarios of simulations andoptimum outfall design were compared by applying CORMIX and mixing behavior of surface, submerged single-port and submerged multi-port outfalls were assumed along with temperate. (According to the environment standard)The results showed that effluent discharge in surface channel is not suitable because of low dilution rate, harmful environmental effect and the lack temperaturedrop below 1C 0 at a distance of 300m from the discharge point and needs on efficient multi-port outfall design.

Keywords:

Brine effluent , CORMIX , Desalination , Persian Gulf , Discharge outfalls