12-22: A State-of-the-Art Chemistry Based Toolset for Developing and Optimizing

For most of the industrial era, water has essentially been viewed as a free or very low-cost commodity but this perception of a plentiful resource is changing rapidly as communities across the country begin to face limitations in fresh water supply. This scarcity of water, coupled with population growth, is driving competition for fresh water between people and power plants. Two frequently used methods of reducing fresh water consumption at power plants are to: 1) replace fresh water with water of degraded quality, and 2) increase the internal recycling of water within the plant. Both of these water conservation methods are technically challenging to evaluate and require affordable tools that can perform the necessary calculations. This paper describes a new chemistry based toolset that enables power industry personnel to build inexpensive yet sophisticated water balance models that are extremely useful for evaluating water saving alternatives.