No one deny that designing and constructing a Coal Fired Steam Power Plant (CFSPP) is a complex process and require collaboration among engineers from various expertise. For an example, a marine engineer will closely related to mechanical and civil engineer to be able to design the sea water intake, coal unloading jetty discharge channel, breakwater (if necessary) and navigation line. Each marine facility need specific inputs from mechanical.

There are three major marine facilities; cooling water intake, coal unloading jetty (with or without breakwater) and discharge channel.

Let’s start from sea water intake. (the following picture shows typical sea water intake for a small power plant (2×10 MW)

Commonly, a power plant requires cooling water for its cooling system. The cooling water may be taken from the nearest source such as sea or river with minimum influence of sedimentation (both dissolved and suspended). During design process, Marine Engineer needs a several data from Mechanical Engineer as follow:

1. required debit flow; the flow will influence the dimension and depth of intake channel.
2. which type of intake pumps will be used (positive suction or negative suction)
3. in which elevation the intake pumps will be installed and
4. required minimum water depth

Next facility is coal unloading jetty.

To decide the optimum design of coal unloading jetty, Mechanical Engineer will provides the Marine for such informations:

1. required annual throughput; for a power plant which has harsh sea condition, the annual throughput will be important to decide how many berth is required to achieve the target.
2. vessel’s size (the largest and the smallest); this information will be a base to decide the depth and size of turning basin, berthing pocket and navigation channel.
3. type (fixed or movable), dimension and general load of  coal unloading equipment; the size of unloading equipments will influence the dimension of the platform.
4. arrangement of unloading equipments on the jetty
5. conveyors width

The third is outfall channel.

If, once through system will be used for cooling system, then the power plant requires outfall channel. For the outfall channel, usually the marine will take the same debit flow as intake to decide the dimension of the channel. However, there is another important things need to be considered for the outfall design, it is temperature of the discharge water. The mechanical eng. will inform the discharged water temperature from the condenser which is usually warmer than the water at intake. This warm water shall be discharged far enough from the intake area to avoid the warm water influence the water temperature at the intake. In addition to the discharge debit and temperature, Marine Engineer needs various environmental/hydro-ocean data to decide the position and length of the outfall channel.

More detail will be uploaded in the next post.

(to be continued)