program to simulate cooling pond? hydrothermal impoundment? 1

[davefitz]

Can anyone advise the names of commerical software that can be used to model a large cooling pond? Other keywords might be a hydothermal impoundment.

back in 1980's there was a mainfram Fortran program called MITEMP, but it seems to be lost to history.

The problem is: wastewater from a FGD system is discharged to a large settling pond at 120F. The pond discharge forms the feed toa bioreactor. The bioreactor biologic material can only accept feed taht is between 60-95 F. The modle is to predict the pond discharge temp over a full year, with input including hourly ASHREA climate data.

 

[BigInch]

Back then we didn't have PCs and spreadsheets. What you describe is not too terribly difficult to model, at least on a simple basis, which can easily be done with Excel, if you are willing to reduce the input data. I'd definately not use hourly data. A daily high and a low temperature, perhaps following a typical average diurnal temperature curve to get the interim profile would do quite nicely. I'd be willing to say that even wind evaporative cooling could be included, if you have the data.

BigInch-born in the trenches.

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.msn.com

 

[davefitz]

biginch:
a guess simple would be the key word.

When I reviewed the US DOE report on MITEMP and their methods, there needs to be included the effect of vertical stratification ( ie if hot inlet feed is discharged at low velocities at the surface, the cooling rate is enhanced, while if it is injected subsurface at high velocites it becomes a well stirred model that cools slower).

The effect of wind on surface evaporation does not appear to be simple, either.

 

[BigInch]

I'm really just making conversation here, having nothing to do with this field of reservoir cooling, but I have done ambient temperature modeling to determine the effects on cooling and/or heating of pipeline products as they travel down the pipeline and I find it a bit interesting. Thanks for bearing along with me.

So, would you require a rigid analysis of stratification, or could it be approximated by typically known behavoirs? Stratification is most prevalent in the top 23-25 ft of lake water, getting the warmest. Below that there is another layer change to about 40 ft where temperatures approach the average yearly temperature.

BigInch-born in the trenches.

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.msn.com

 

[davefitz]

BigInch;
The settling pond is a max depth of only 28 ft. In the summer, we would discharge hot blowdown to the top layers for faster cooling , and in the winter would discharge to the bottom to slow down cooling.



I just heard from the author of the 1979 MITEMP fortran program , wnd he will send me the dusty original code, so maybe this problem will go away.Hopefully it is not in punched cards

 

[BigInch]

Have no fear. Somebody is restoring an IBM 1620 to working condition,

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Good Luck.

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.msn.com

 

[davefitz]

as a followup, the correlations needed to calculate the steady state pond performance are contained in EPRI report CS-4320, pages A1-A2. These are easily input to an excel spreadsheet, as BigInch stated.

The steady state calc for our settling pond in N. Carolina shows that the pond discharge would be too cold for the bioreactor active media for 3 winter months.