Hydrodynamic simulations to investigate protection alternatives against jellyfish ingress

It has been reported that jellyfish ingress have swarmed the intake bays of many power and desalination plants in the world. The ingress caused a significant head loss at the intakes of those plants which affected the pumping of seawater needed for cooling purposes dramatically. Although, many alternative strategies for controlling jellyfish ingress were proposed, the solution of jellyfish ingress was limited to local scales without general satisfactory and efficient solutions. The aim of this paper is to propose the installation of a screen at the breakwater heads just at the entrance of the intake bay of any plant in order to act as an early barrier for the jellyfish or big coral reefs. Having the screen at the entrance of the intake bay will make the screen oriented parallel to the dominant sea current. Consequently, the sea current tends to sweep off any objects that caught by the screen and push them back into the sea. A hydrodynamic model was used to simulate the interaction between sea currents, jellyfish motion and plant's suction velocity for different setups of the proposed screen. The proposed simulation was illustrated for Muscat desalination plant as one of the real plants in the Gulf region.