EN345 Modeling and Simulations of Environmental Systems


Instructor: Nikolay S. Strigul
E-mails: nstrigul@stevens.edu
Office Hours: by appointment

Lectures: Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:30 pm, Rocco bld, Conference room
Homeworks: There will be weekly homework assignments.
Exams: There will be Midterm and Final Exams.

Grading:

Course program Course program (PDF)

General comments:

EN345 is an undergraduate course for environmental engineering majors. The primary goal is to incorporate fundamental phenomena into mass balances to describe element cycles and the fate and transport of contaminants in environmental systems. This course will teach students to appreciate the advantages and limitations of models for managing environmental problems. The course will cover models of mass balance and reaction kinetics for completely mixed systems and incompletely mixed systems represented by systems of ordinary differential equations and reaction-diffusion-advection partially differential equations, respectively. Particular examples will be mostly focused on water-quality modeling, including fate and transport modeling of pollutants in rivers, estuaries, and lakes. This course will include a comprehensive treatment of mass balance models of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in environmental systems incorporating abiotic and biotic transformation processes. Models of toxicant effects on natural populations will be also covered. The theoretical models will be presented in concert with real-life examples published in international journals. The models will be investigated by analytical and numerical methods (using Mathematica and other software).

Textbooks

Surface Water Quality Modeling by S.C. Chapra
Environmental Modeling: Fate and Transport of Pollutants in Water, Air, and Soil by J.L. Schnoor
Spatial Ecology via Reaction-Diffusion Equations by R.S. Cantrell and C. Cosner

Course program:

Lecture 1. - Introduction to environmental modeling.

Lecture 2. - Mass balance in time and space. Derivation of reaction-advection-diffusion equations.

Lecture 3. - Mass balance for a well-mixed lake. Continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR).

Lecture 4. - Different loading functions for CSTR. Nondimensionalisation and particular solutions.

Lecture 5. - Lakes in series. Feedforward systems of CSTRs.

Lecture 6. - Feedback systems of CSTRs. Steady state matrices for coupled reactors with first-order kinetics.

Lecture 7. - Spatially-distributed systems in one dimension. Steady-state theory.

Lecture 8. - Temporal dynamics of one-dimensional distributed systems.

Lecture 9. - Microbial kinetics.

Lecture 10. - Eutrophication, temperature and nutrients.

Lecture 11. - Carbon cycles and oxygen in aquatic systems.

Lecture 12. - Nitrogen cycle.

Lecture 13. - Phosphorus cycle.

Lecture 14. - Modeling toxicant and population dynamics.

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