Analysis of Contaminant Transport under Wind Conditions on the Surface of a Shallow Lake

Abstract

The increasing industrial activities near several lakes in Paraguay have been the main reason for its pollution and, therefore, there is an urgency to find solutions to environmental problems caused. In this paper, contaminant transport, represented by a non-reactive passive scalar transport, is analysed under fluctuating wind conditions. Flow velocities obtained from the two-dimensional (2D) NavierStokes equations are used to calculate contaminant concentrations along the considered geometry, which is the surface of the Lake Ypacarai, in Paraguay. The equations are discretized by finite volume method and solved with OpenFOAM(R). Field data measurements of total phosphorus are used to contrast the numerical results. This paper evaluates different pollution scenarios of the Lake Ypacarai varying the direction of the wind, and the numerical results present a great similarity between the simulated results and field measurements, describing qualitatively the behaviour of the considered lake.