Engineering news
Scientists at the University of Bristol are working with the energy industry to develop an early warning tool to predict the sudden, en masse appearance of jellyfish swarms which can cause severe problems by clogging the water intakes of coastal power plants.
The reduction in cooling water caused by these swarms means coastal power plants have occasionally run at reduced efficiency or temporarily shut down as a precautionary measure. This can have an impact on the provision of electricity to customers and incur a significant cost to the supplier.
A persistent difficulty lies in identifying the origin of swarms, or blooms, and predicting when they will impact coastal sites.
The university’s team, led by Dr Sally Wood and Erica Hendy from the School of Earth Sciences, will be developing their ideas by working with EDF Energy at its Torness power station, 50km east of Edinburgh.
Torness supplies about a third of Scotland's electricity and was offline for a week in June 2011 following a precautionary shutdown of both reactors after a blockage of cooling filters caused by a swarm of moon jellyfish.
Wood said: "The aim of the project is to develop a robust tool for the rapid evaluation of the likelihood and scale of jellyfish ingress at Torness based on simulated patterns of historic bloom dispersal within the North Sea from the last 20 years.
"To achieve this we will be translating previous research using a marine dispersal modelling system to simulate the transport of jellyfish blooms by ocean currents, incorporating specific biological behaviours of jellyfish."
The project, which has been funded by the National Environment Research Council and EDF Energy, has two objectives. The first is to provide gridded maps, specific to the time of year or oceanographic conditions, giving the probability that a bloom arising at any source location within the North Sea will be transported within the vicinity of Torness, as well as minimum and peak arrival times. The second is to test the suitability of the tool for providing an early warning of potential threat from incoming jellyfish blooms at other locations, including validation with historic and satellite-based observational data.
"The methodology we will be using is deliberately generic to allow adaptation to other sensitive coastal sites and we have already received support from other organisations that can be affected by jellyfish blooms such as the farmed salmon industry", Hendy added.