Flue gas discharge from cooling towers. Wind tunnel investigation of building downwash effects on ground-level concentrations

Abstract

German power plants are required to meet new emission standards which limit the maximum sulfur dioxide (SOs) concentration in flue gas discharges to 400 mg m −3. To achieve this level of reduction in SO 2 concentration, wet scrubbing is necessary for large plants using lignite or hard coal. Wet scrubbing results in a significant reduction in the flue gas temperature leading to low effective stack heights. Instead of using stack gas reheating to achieve the plume rise necessary to satisfy local environmental standards, it was proposed to discharge the scrubbed flue gas from the existing natural-draft cooling towers (NDCT). This method should be effective in reducing local ground-level concentrations since NDCT-plumes are typically very buoyant (densimetric Froude number below 1 ) and normally reach considerable heights of rise. Only under strong wind conditions does the situation reverse itself. For such strong winds, the NDCT-plume is subject to tower and building downwash with the possibility of unacceptably high ground-level concentrations. For a 2700 MW e lignite-fired power plant near Cologne, a wind tunnel study was carried out to investigate the effects of tower and building downwash effects on the ground-level concentrations of SO 2 produced by discharging the scrubbed flue gas from the natural-draft cooling towers. Also, a comparison was made between the ground-level concentrations produced by the cooling tower discharge method and those produced by a traditional stack. It was found that for low and intermediate wind speeds, the groundlevel concentrations are lower for the case of the cooling tower discharge. Only for strong winds, which occur only very rarely at most German sites, did the conventional stack discharge appear to be superior.