Professor, Department of Civil and Geomatics Engineering California State University, Fresno
Brine management is a major concern for most desalination plants, which motivates planners to identify appropriate path and discharge locations for safely and cost effectively discharging brine. The proper management of salinity in California agriculture and municipal wastewater is essential for the long-term viability of California’s natural, agricultural, and human resources. This motivates the work proposed here. With the focus of this study to apply engineering, planning, and management tools in an integrated manner to identify some alternative paths for the brine pipelines, the objective of the study is to develop a pilot planning and cost estimation tool to calculate the hydraulics and estimated cost for the construction of a brine pipeline for the user identified selected paths. With an option to select the amount of brine (volumetric flow rate) at different concentration levels, the user can choose a potential pipeline path from start to discharge location within a selected area, from which the planning tool can calculate the hydraulics including but not limited to velocity, friction loss, energy requirement, pump size etc. The hydraulics information together with land, civil works, and construction info results in estimated cost using appropriate built-in information in lookup tables. Methodology includes collecting different required data layers and using them on ArcGIS environment. The programming on ArcGIS is used to calculate the hydraulics, energy requirement, and cost estimation.
