Water artificial circulation for eutrophication control

Abstract

This work analyzes, from a mathematical point of view, the artificial mixing of water - by means of several pairs collector/injector that set up a circulation pattern in the waterbody - in order to prevent the undesired effects of eutrophication. The environmental problem is formulated as a constrained optimal control problem of partial differential equations, where the state system is related to the velocity of water and to the concentrations of the different species involved in the eutrophication processes, and the cost function to be minimized represents the volume of recirculated water. In the main part of the work, the wellposedness of the problem and the existence of an optimal control is demonstrated. Finally, a complete numerical algorithm for its computation is presented, and some numerical results for a realistic problem are also given.