Gaseous pollutant dispersion measurements on an wind tunnel model of a waste incinerator

A wind tunnel study of plume rise and dispersion at a twin-stack waste incinerator has been carried out in the large stratified wind tunnel facility at the EnFlo Research Centre (University of Surrey). The model scale was 1 to 300 and measurements of mean scalar gas concentration were performed with a flame ionisation detector (FID) based system in a neutral boundary layer simulating a rural environment. Standard buoyancy scaling relationships were used to determine the discharge conditions at model scale. Mean plume heights, lateral and vertical spreads were obtained from the analysis of vertical and crosswind concentration profiles measured at different downstream distances from the sources. Effects of the wind direction with respect to the alignment of the two chimneys were investigated. Vertical concentration profiles showed a slight increase of the average plume height, as a consequence of the plumes interaction, when the two stacks were aligned along the wind direction. Experimental results have been compared with the standard ISCST2 gaussian code, with the ADMS2 integral model and with a modified version of the ISCST2 code.