Numerical treatment of a modified MacCormack scheme in a nondimensional form of the water quality models in a nonuniform flow stream

Abstract

Two mathematical models are used to simulate water quality in a nonuniform flow stream. The first model is the hydrodynamic model that provides the velocity field and the elevation of water. The second model is the dispersion model that provides the pollutant concentration field. Both models are formulated in one-dimensional equations. The traditional Crank-Nicolson method is also used in the hydrodynamic model. At each step, the flow velocity fields calculated from the first model are the input into the second model as the field data. A modified MacCormack method is subsequently employed in the second model. This paper proposes a simply remarkable alteration to the MacCormack method so as to make it more accurate without any significant loss of computational efficiency. The results obtained indicate that the proposed modified MacCormack scheme does improve the prediction accuracy compared to that of the traditional MacCormack method. © 2014 Nopparat Pochai.