Copyright © 2011 Nopparat Pochai. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The stream water quality model of water quality assessment problems often involves numerical methods to solve the equations. The governing equation of the uniform flow model is one-dimensional advection-dispersion-reaction equations (ADREs). In this paper, a better finite difference scheme for solving ADRE is focused, and the effect of nonuniform water flows in a stream is considered. Two mathematical models are used to simulate pollution due to sewage effluent. The first is a hydrodynamic model that provides the velocity field and elevation of the water flow. The second is a advection-dispersion-reaction model that gives the pollutant concentration fields after input of the velocity data from the hydrodynamic model. For numerical techniques, we used the Crank-Nicolson method for system of a hydrodynamic model and the explicit schemes to the dispersion model. The revised explicit schemes are modified from two computation techniques of uniform flow stream problems: forward time central space (FTCS) and Saulyev schemes for dispersion model. A comparison of both schemes regarding stability aspect is provided so as to illustrate their applicability to the real-world problem.