JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Urban and industrial wastewaters are considered as the most contaminant of surface water. Entrance   of these pollutants to the river reduces the concentration of dissolved oxygen and aquatic life will be threatened. So, one of the main qualitative characteristics of water resources management is the concentration of dissolved oxygen. The base of the   developed model in this investigation is the convection- diffusion equation in soil. Terms of production and decay of dissolved oxygen were added to this equation. The final equation was discretized using the finite difference method with the implicit scheme. With applying the initial and boundary conditions, the equation set was solved by the Thomas algorithm. The calculations were done by programming in the MATLAB software. For the calibration and validation of the model, data obtained from two reaches of Zayanderoud River, including steel melt and Mobarakeh Steel factories, were used. The temporal and spatial variations of the dissolved oxygen were plotted and compared with the real data and the results of the MSP and CSP models. The results showed that the concentration of the dissolved oxygen could be well predicted through solving convection-diffusion equation with introducing two terms for the decay and production of oxygen. The comparison between the results of the model and two other models showed that the model led to better results in comparison to the MSP and CSP models.