Abstract

This paper studies the propagation of the air pollutants released from a single generator such as an industrial chimney to an observed area such as a residential area or an agricultural land in two dimensions. The aims are to develop a model to visualize the propagation of the pollutants over time and to compute an average concentration of the pollutants on the observed area subject to various factors such as wind speed, the distance from the observed area to the generator, and how the pollutants are emitted. We model the problem as a system of partial differential equations composed of the Navier-Stokes and the advection-diffusion equations and numerically solve it by the finite element method. To illustrate the technique, we visualized the propagation of the pollutants for several emission case studies and computed their concentrations on an observed area over time.