Environmental impact from wet plumes in combined-cycle power plants

In the present study, we have carried out an investigation into some of the environmental effects of high energy efficiency power generation plants that produce electrical and thermal energy. The use of natural gas fuels may represent a success for the replacement of liquid or solid fuels, because of drastic reductions of sulphur oxides, carbon dioxide and particulates. An additional problem involves the study of the effects of vapour emissions from the combustion of fuels and from the cooling towers of the condenser device. Particulary, the problem of the analysis of vapour and drift diffusion, because of emissions from the wet cooling devices, is faced in terms of modelling the plume rise and mass loss of drift in the atmosphere, because of evaporation, in order to predict the increment of rain and the humidity effect. The results obtained show that the amount of water emitted in the forms of vapour and drift, in terms of local scale diffusion, do not create problems of high increments of relative humidity or dangerous rainfall phenomena: while the effects of vapour emission are shown as insignificant problems because of the deposition of a sensible amount of drift, correlated with the type of separator devices chosen can appear, but only on very limited areas.