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Predicting Solute Transport In Natural Streams - A Stochastic Approach, Xueqing Zhou

Dissertations and Theses

The existing theories for predicting longitudinal dispersion in straight open channels have long been recognized as inadequate when applied to natural rivers. These theories tend to grossly underestimate dispersion in real streams since an important mixing mechanism due to nonuniform river cross-section variations is not explicitly taken into account. Recognizing the important role of stream irregularities on solute transport and the analytical difficulties of classical deterministic analysis, we develop a stochastic approach for analyzing solute transport in natural streams. Variations in river width and bed elevation are conveniently represented as one-dimensional random fields, characterized by their autocorrelation functions. Advection and …