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Once through cooling water power plant simulation

Thu, 02/12/2009 - 3:46pm — Kirk
I am modeling a lake that has a steam electric power plant intake (several hundred mgd) and discharge. The tricky part is that the discharge is to a different model segment and branch than the intake. I know the model can handle internal outflows through weirs, pipes, pumps, gates, and spillways. However, none of these seem to be quite applicable - in the model, the flow rates all are based to some extent on water surface elevation. In the case of this lake the flow rate is governed by power generation demand and lake elevation is relatively constant. I have also considered specifying the intake and discharge independently as a withdrawal and tributary. However, in this case I would lose the ability to propogate simulated water quality constituent concentrations from intake to discharge. Any ideas?
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Hydrodynamics
Thu, 02/12/2009 - 4:13pm — chris

Hi Kirk, A pump might work. You could set the water surface elevation for turning the pump off to a low elevation that the water surface never drops below, thus leaving the pump on continuously. There can also be multiple pumps between the same segments, and for each one of the these pumps you can a specify different flow rate and different operational time period on the pump card. chris
Fri, 02/13/2009 - 11:23pm — Kirk

Thanks. Unfortunately the flow is surprisingly irregular, so I would need too many pipes. Someone suggested that I simulate it as a separate withdrawal and tributary, then modify the model code to write a temporary outfile on a daily basis giving the constituent concentrations and temperatures of the source (withdrawal) segment, and reading that as the tributary concentration file. Can you think of a reason this would not work? Kirk Dean, Ph.D. PARSONS 512-719-6016 kirk.dean@parsons.com
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 9:31am — chris

Karl, That should work. You could also modify the source code so that you don´t need the temporary output file, and the water quality of the withdrawal segment is directed to the tributary inflow, but that would require more coding. chris