Numerical Study of Technogenic Thermal Pollution Zones’ Formations in the Water Environment from the Activities of the Power Plant

Abstract

Thermal pollution of water bodies is an inevitable consequence of a thermal or nuclear power plant operation. To minimize the harmful effects, it is necessary to evaluate the different locations for the heated water discharge from the power plant. The most effective approach to solving these problems is a computational experiment. In this paper, the numerical studies of thermal pollution of the Irtysh River as a natural water cooling system from the power plant operation were presented. Such problems are traditionally solved in a two-dimensional formulation by using the “shallow water” approximation. Moreover in this work, a two-dimensional model for the numerical simulation of a flow was used with its characteristics of mixing heated water discharged from lateral protrusions with a transverse flow. Furthermore, experimental data and numerical results of other authors were used in order to check the conformity of the numerical results. The obtained numerical results gave good agreement with the experimental data for selecting the optimal turbulent model, in particular, the jets trajectory, the recirculation zone size, and the dimensionless excess temperature distribution. For this purpose, the turbulent models (k − e, k − ω) were chosen for the turbulent kinetic energy boundary conditions to match the experimental data. Also, studies were conducted to study thermal pollution under different scenarios, the impact of the heated water discharge from a power plant into the Irtysh River.