New Unstructured Mesh Water Quality Model for Cooling Water Biocide Discharges

A new unstructured mesh coastal water and air quality model has been developed that includes species transport, nonlinear decay, by-product formation, and mass-exchange between sea and atmosphere. The model has been programmed with a graphical user 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, by-product 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, a submerged residual chlorine cooling water discharge and halogenated matter by-product formation 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. The new model has been named 3D Simulation for Marine and Atmospheric Reactive Transport, in short 3D SMART.