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Fifty-four water samples were collected between July and December 2019 at nine monitoring stations and fifteen parameters were analysed to provide an updated diagnosis of the Piabanha River water quality. Further, forty years of monitoring were analysed, including government data and previous research projects. A georeferenced database was also built containing water management data. The Water Quality Index from the National Sanitation Foundation (WQINSF) was calculated using two datasets and showed an improvement in overall water quality, despite still presenting systematic violations to Brazilian standards. Principal components analysis (PCA) showed the most contributing parameters to water quality and enabled its association with the main pollution sources identified in the geodatabase. PCA showed that sewage discharge is still the main pollution source. The cluster analysis (CA) made possible to recommend the monitoring network optimization, thereby enabling the expansion of the monitoring to other rivers. Finally, the diagnosis provided by this research establishes the first step towards the Framing of water resources according to their intended uses, as established by the Brazilian National Water Resources Policy.

SUMMARYThe present paper discusses the numerical solution of steady-state non-linear heat conduction problems in composite bodies by using the boundary element method. Two kinds of non-linearities are considered: the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity and boundary conditions of the radiative type. By introducing the integral of conductivity as a new variable the governing equation of the problem becomes linear in the transform space. Transformed boundary conditions of the Dirichlet and Neumann types are also linear but convective boundary conditions become non-linear. Also, discontinuities arise in the value of the integral of conductivity across the interface between materials with different properties since continuity of temperature is imposed. The problem is numerically solved by discretizing the external and interface boundaries of the region under consideration with constant boundary elements and applying an iterative scheme of the Newton-Raphson type.

Water quality monitoring is a complex issue that requires support tools in order to provide information for water resource management. Budget constraints as well as an inadequate water quality network design call for the development of evaluation tools to provide efficient water quality monitoring. For this purpose, a nonlinear principal component analysis (NLPCA) based on an autoassociative neural network was performed to assess the redundancy of the parameters and monitoring locations of the water quality network in the Piabanha River watershed. Oftentimes, a small number of variables contain the most relevant information, while the others add little or no interpretation to the variability of water quality. Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used for this purpose. However, conventional PCA is not able to capture the nonlinearities of water quality data, while neural networks can represent those nonlinear relationships. The results presented in this work demonstrate that NLPCA performs better than PCA in the reconstruction of the water quality data of Piabanha watershed, explaining most of data variance. From the results of NLPCA, the most relevant water quality parameter is fecal coliforms (FCs) and the least relevant is chemical oxygen demand (COD). Regarding the monitoring locations, the most relevant is Poço Tarzan (PT) and the least is Parque Petrópolis (PP).

This paper presents a procedure for decision analysis in water use conflicts among irrigators. It seeks feasible compromise term among decision makers by using optimal results for different proposals of solutions. The process is developed by applying the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution. The case study is the existing conflict among Coqueiros canal water users. This 45 km canal belongs to a complex irrigation and drainage canal network and it is located at Campos dos Goytacazes municipality, in the northern region of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Its basin has a potential irrigable area of approximately 14,000 ha. Six hypothetical scenarios have been built, each one corresponding to different alternatives to the conflict solution. In addition, two different tendencies were adopted by the Management Institution (MI) in order to take care of the conflict. The first tendency takes into account that the MI has no explicit preferences for any of its actions. As for the second one, the MI shows explicit preferences for the scenarios which provide more income taxes. Some scenarios that reached the state of equilibrium were analyzed to provide solutions to the conflict.