Analysis on the characteristics of a pollutant dispersion in river environment

Abstract A tracer experiment using a radioisotope was carried out to investigate the characteristics of pollutant transport and to estimate the dispersion coefficients in a river system. A well-known radioisotope tracer technique was applied to measure the dispersion coefficients in Daejong river which is located in the southeast area in Korea. The dispersion coefficients were determined by moment, routing and analytical methods based on the measured radioisotope data. Two-dimensional numerical models were used to simulate the flow fields and the concentration distributions of the radioisotope injected into the river. The calculated results were compared with the measurements. As a comparative study, the computed concentration distributions agreed well in the case of the usage of the dispersion coefficients determined by the moment method.