New unstructured mesh water quality model for coastal discharges

Abstract

A new unstructured mesh coastal water and air quality model has been developed that includes species transport, nonlinear decay, byproduct formation and mass-exchange between sea and atmosphere. The model has been programmed with a graphical interface and is applicable to coastal seawater, lakes and rivers. Focused on species conversion and interaction with the atmosphere, the water and air quality model follows a modular approach. It is a compatible module which simulates distributions based on fluid dynamic field data of underlying existing hydrodynamic and atmospheric simulations. Nonlinear and spline approximations of decay and growth kinetics, byproduct formation and joint sea–atmosphere simulation have been embedded. The Windows application software includes functions allowing error analysis concerning mesh and finite volume approximation. In this work, an anoxic submerged process-water discharge has been simulated. An error analysis has been carried out by varying vertical meshing, time-steps and comparing results based on explicit and implicit finite volume approximation.