Air Dispersion Model to Forecast Pollutant Concentration Around Thermal Power Plants

The Mexican environmental authority requires that thermal power plants operate 3 or 4 air quality monitoring stations around its main stack to ensure that pollutant concentration levels are always below the maximum allowable. However the high cost of these stations and the cost of their maintenance have made this regulation economically unreasonable. It has been proposed to reduce the number of monitoring stations to one and substitute the other stations by an accurate atmospheric dispersion model that allows the permanent surveillance of the surface pollutant concentration levels around the thermoelectric power plants. CALPUFF, an advanced air pollution dispersion modeling system was implemented for the special case of the Mexican thermal power plants. Experimental work was conducted to verify the correct implementation of the model. This paper describes the main results obtained during the development of this work.