Numerical Prediction of Background Buildup of Salinity Due to Desalination Brine Discharges into the Northern Arabian Gulf
Name
water-11-02284.pdf
Size
1.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ab859fa20a3a67fd1389f63c5f740374
Author(s)
Chow, Aaron C.
Verbruggen, Wilbert
Morelissen, Robin
Al-Osairi, Yousef
Ponnumani, Poornima
Lababidi, Haitham M. S.
Al-Anzi, Bader
Adams, E. Eric
Date Issued
October 2019
Journal
Water
Publisher
MDPI AG
Citation
Chow, Aaron C. et al. "Numerical Prediction of Background Buildup of Salinity Due to Desalination Brine Discharges into the Northern Arabian Gulf." Water 11, 11 (October 2019): 2284 © 2019 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Brine discharges from desalination plants into low-flushing water bodies are challenging from the point of view of dilution, because of the possibility of background buildup effects that decrease the overall achievable dilution. To illustrate the background buildup effect, this paper uses the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, a shallow, reverse tidal estuary with only one outlet available for exchange flow. While desalination does not significantly affect the long-term average Gulf-wide salinity, due to the mitigating effect of the Indian Ocean Surface Water inflow, its resulting elevated salinities, as well as elevated concentrations of possible contaminants (such as heavy metals and organophosphates), can affect marine environments on a local and regional scale. To analyze the potential effect of background salinity buildup on dilutions achievable from discharge locations in the northern Gulf, a 3-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Delft3D) was used to simulate brine discharges from a single hypothetical source location along the Kuwaiti shoreline, about 900 km from the Strait of Hormuz. Using nested grids with a horizontal resolution, comparable to a local tidal excursion (250 m), far field dilutions of about 28 were computed for this discharge location. With this far field dilution, to achieve a total dilution of 20, the near field dilution (achievable using a submerged diffuser) would need to be increased to approximately 70. Conversely, the background build-up means that a near field dilution of 20 yields a total dilution of only about 12.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/w11112284
