An operational real-time air quality modelling system for industrial plants

The advances on computer power capabilities and air quality modelling systems (AQMS) has reached to a high degree of sophistication during the last decade. Nowadays, the state-of-the-art air quality modelling systems such as MM5eCMAQ can handle the evaluation of air pollution concentrations in a very high detail in time and space. MM5 is a non-hydrostatic modelling system developed by PSU/NCAR (USA) during the last 20 years and continuously updated by the scientific community. CMAQ is a Community Multi-scale Air Quality Modelling System for simulating the transport and chemical concentrations in the air in 3D space and time developed by EPA (USA) in 2000. Both systems are complementary and allow a full simulation of the atmospheric flow to determine the amount of air pollution concentration exists in the 3D space and during a specific period of time. TEAP (a tool to evaluate the air quality impact of industrial plants) is an EUREKA project coordinated by UPM with the participation of INDRA S.A., Institute of Physics (Lithuania) and AB ‘MAZEIKIU NAFTA’ (Lithuania). This tool allows the industrial plants e and electric power plants e to have a full control in real-time and forecasting mode of the impact of the industrial emission under daily basis by using the so-called ONeOFF operational mode. The ONeOFF mode requires to run the AQMS both time in parallel by using the industrial plant emissions (ON) and excluding them (OFF). The system allows a full knowledge of the impact of industrial emissions for the next 48e72 h in full space (3D) domain, time and for every criteria pollutant (NOx, SO2, CO, O3, PM). The system requires a powerful post-processing analysis module and a clustering approach to optimize the computer capabilities. The system is mounted over a PC cluster platform under Linux operating system. Results show a full and detail analysis of the amount of air pollutant concentrations due to the industrial plant emissions in time and space and under daily operational basis. The EU Air Quality Directives mark the air concentration limits to be taken into account into the TEAP system in forecasting mode to be fulfilled. The system allows to simulate also different industrial emission reduction strategies according to the optimal economical/production balance. The system can easily be adapted for emergency use.