Modeling of nitrobenzene in the river with ice process in high-latitude regions

Abstract

To deal with the accidental release of pollutants into frozen rivers, those rivers in high-latitude regions should be treated differently. Pollutants could be stored up in the ice and released when the ice melts in spring, perhaps resulting in secondary pollution in the river. A water quality model of nitrobenzene has been developed in this paper to assess the influence on river water quality due to the freezing process. The model is made up of three modules: thermodynamic module, hydrodynamic module and water quality module. The thermodynamic module considers the complex heat exchange processes between the water body and the atmosphere, the water body and the river bed, the water body and the ice cover, and so on. The growth of the ice cover is simulated in a simplified form whilst taking consideration of heat balance. The hydrodynamic model uses the Saint-Venant equations in non-constant flow and the influence of the ice cover is measured. The degradation, diffusion, absorption and desorption, and the influence of the freezing process are incorporated in the water quality module and the concept of Continuously Stirred Tanked Reactors (CSTRs) model is applied in the model construction. The model has been applied to supporting the management of accidental pollution in the Songhua River. The model was calibrated and validated with monitored data. Regional sensitivity analysis based on a task-based Hornberger-Spear-Young (HSY) algorithm was carried out to examine the model structure and the result showed that the model could describe the system very well. Then the conditioned model was applied to predicting the concentration of nitrobenzene in the water when the ice melted in spring. The predictive result showed that the release of pollutants in the ice could lead to an increase in the concentration of pollutants in the water, but the increase would be very small because there was only a small amount of pollutants stored in the ice. A secondary pollution could therefore be avoided. Also, with necessary modifications, the model established in this study could be applied to the water quality management in rivers that freeze in winter.