Computational Modeling of Pollution Transmission in Rivers

Abstract

Modeling of river pollution contributes to better management of water quality and this will lead to the improvement of human health. The advection dispersion equation (ADE) is the government equation on pollutant transmission in the river. Modeling the pollution transmission includes numerical solution of the ADE and estimating the longitudinal dispersion coefficient (LDC). In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for numerical modeling of the pollution transmission in rivers. It is related to use both finite volume method as numerical method and artificial neural network (ANN) as soft computing technique together in simulation. In this approach, the result of the ANN for predicting the LDC was considered as input parameter for the numerical solution of the ADE. To validate the model performance in real engineering problems, the pollutant transmission in Severn River has been simulated. Comparison of the final model results with measured data of the Severn River showed that the model has good performance. Predicting the LDC by ANN model significantly improved the accuracy of computer simulation of the pollution transmission in river.