The use of advanced tools in the environmental impact assessment of common industrial process is a key factor that assures a correct design and the most realistic impact scenarios. Effluent disposal into the ocean is an important part of a coastal water treatment plant, if the disposal procedure is designed on a conservative approach, most probably the use of a diffuser plus hundreds of meters of pipeline would be required; however, the pipeline length and the difusser number would not prevent us to understand how the effluent is mixing with the ocean.

A right assessment of the effluent mixing zone would require a baseline of sea currents, discharge flows, seawater and effluent density, bathymetry, waves, infraestructure geometry and a tool that can analyse the interaction of the mentioned factors. OpenFOAM is a numerical model for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling capable of modeling fluids with complex geometries, conditions and requirements; with OpenFOAM one can model compressible/uncompressible, single phase / multiphase, flows that mix, non-newtonian flows, etc. OpenFOAM comes with build-in tools for model construction and visualization, and there is Salome Platform for advanced mesh generation.

This tutorial show the entire procedure for the simulation of a effluent of 40 l/s into the ocean that has a current of 0.05 m/s. The model is on transient conditions, model simulation were done under uniform discharge rates, the development of the mixing zone was analyzed with paraView tools and a water chemistry component was introduced into the simulation with some Python scripts.

Model Geometry

This is the layout of the model geometry with the vertex coordinates

Alternativas de vertimiento de efluentes al mar.jpg

Tutorial

First Part - Mesh generation

Second Part - Model Construction

Third Part - Output representation

Input data

You can download the input data for this tutorial here.

Python code

This is the code for the water chemistry component calculation

import os, tarfile, re, gzip
os.chdir('C:\\OpenFOAM\\18.02\\USER-dev\\run\\effluentMixingZone')
listaarchivos = os.listdir(os.getcwd())
listaarchivos[:5]

# Hallamos el mayor valor de tiempo
listatiempos = []
for tiempo in listaarchivos:
    try:
        listatiempos.append(int(tiempo))
    except ValueError:
        pass

tiemposimulacion = max(listatiempos)
print('La simulacion tiene una longitud de ' + str(tiemposimulacion))

# Aqui definimos las concentraciones iniciales
Conc_Agua=0.0001
Conc_Efluente=0.2

footer = '''
boundaryField
{
    inlet
    {
        type            zeroGradient;
    }

    outlet
    {
        type            zeroGradient;
    }

    effluent
    {
        type            inletOutlet;
        inletValue      uniform 0.2;
        value           uniform 0.2;
    }
    
    modelWall
    {
        type            zeroGradient;
    }

    atmosphere
    {
        type            zeroGradient;
    }

'''

# Desempacamos los archivos zipeados de water y other
for archivo in listatiempos:
    os.chdir(str(archivo))
    
    #unpack and convert gzip files
    with gzip.open('alpha.water.gz', 'rb') as f:
        with open('alpha.water', 'w') as g:
            g.write(f.read().decode('utf-8'))
            
    with gzip.open('alpha.other.gz', 'rb') as f:
        with open('alpha.other', 'w') as g:
            g.write(f.read().decode('utf-8'))
    
    #read the text files
    with open('alpha.water', 'r') as f:
        lin_alphawater = f.readlines()
    with open('alpha.other', 'r') as f:
        lin_alphaother = f.readlines()

    #find the start and end of element sequence
    limTexto = []
    for i, texto in enumerate(lin_alphawater):
        #print(texto)
        if 'internal' in texto:
            limTexto.append(i)
        if 'boundary' in texto:
            limTexto.append(i)
    print('This is the element length: ' + str(limTexto[1]-3-limTexto[0]-3))
 
    #Empezamos el archivo de alpha.componente
    with open('alpha.componente', 'w') as componente:
        for linea in lin_alphawater[:limTexto[0]+3]:
            linea = re.sub('alpha.water','alpha.componente',linea)
            componente.write(linea)
 
        #Ahora hacemos la conversion
        for elemento in range(limTexto[0]+3,limTexto[1]-3):
            concMezcla = float(lin_alphawater[elemento])*Conc_Agua+float(lin_alphaother[elemento])*Conc_Efluente
            if concMezcla > 0.5:
                print(elemento)
            componente.write("%.6f" % concMezcla+'\n')
        componente.write(');\n')
        componente.write(footer)

    #os.system('gzip -f alpha.water alpha.other alpha.componente')
    with gzip.open('alpha.componente.gz', 'wb') as f:
        with open('alpha.componente', 'r') as g:
            f.write(g.read().encode('utf-8'))
    os.remove('alpha.water') 
    os.remove('alpha.other')
    os.remove('alpha.componente')
    os.chdir(os.pardir)