Submarine Outfall Design Methodology for Argentinean Coasts

The purpose of the following is to introduce why it is important and how we propose to improve the conditions of treatment and effluents discharge (urban / industrial / rain) on the Argentinean coasts. It is well known that those directly affect the quality of coastal waters and may have a considerable impact on human health (swimming area) or the environmental quality of coastal ecosystems (such as right whales in the bay of Puerto Madryn). The best ecological and economic way to reduce the harmful effects of wastewater discharged near the coast is a well designed combination of submarine outfalls with diffusers. It has been used and discussed all over the world for decades.Today Argentina is still falling behind other countries in South America such Brazil, Chile or Venezuela that sum together more than one hundred submarine outfalls. The design of each submarine outfall is a unique case. It is characterized by the size of the city that operates it, the environment (waves, tides, currents, wind), the geometry and the nature of the seabed, the fragility of ecosystems that surround it and the budget. It is in fact important to design each submarine outfall to its application. Thus what we concretely propose here is to improve the knowledge on the capacity of different outfall diffusers and in different environments by measuring the mixing and the initial dilution that it causes. In order to control each variable parameter and to facilitate measurements the work will be part of a laboratory investigation. We will present a methodology based on reliable past studies and specially designed for the Laboratorio de Hidraulica of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba with its 23m open water channel, its modern instruments (ADV, laser Nd:Yag for PID and LIF techniques) and the known numerical models such as Cormix and Delft3D. To conclude the following presents a method to meliorate the knowledge on submarine outfalls diffusers capacities in different environments and thus improve the quality of Argentinean coastal waters.