Distribution of Air Pollutants in South Pars Gas Complex Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Air pollution is simply defined as addition of any substance, which is called “pollutant” to the atmosphere which may have a deleterious effect to human health and the environment. Nowadays, the rapid expansion of industries including oil and gas industries has caused excessive pollutants to emit to the air. Therefore, researchers have directed their attention to develop numerical models for application of flow field behavior and dispersion of pollutants in industrial and urban areas in recent years. In this work, the dispersion of gaseous pollutants from stacks and flares of South Pars Gas Complex, located in Iran, is simulated. Furthermore, the CFD model is used to determine the dispersion patterns of gaseous pollutants including CO, SO2 and NO2 in the ambient. Concentrations of pollutants in the ambient air were also measured at several locations to validate this high-resolution CFD simulation. The obtained results indicate that there is a good agreement between the numerical simulation outputs and the measured values. The results also suggest that the standard k-ε turbulence model is satisfactory for simulating the effect of turbulence on the dispersion of pollutants for the industries.