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The present study involves the application of a water quality model QUAL2K for developing the BOD-DO model and evaluation of the results for a 50 km stretch of river Ghataprabha near Mudhol town of Bagalkot district, Karnataka. QUAL2K is a modeling framework for simulating river and stream water quality. Arc-GIS technique is used to obtain some hydro-geometric data of the river for input to model QUAL2K. For calibration and validation of the model, the BOD and DO values were monitored at six different locations. The calibrated model was validated to predict water quality using a different set of data under different conditions. The performance of the model was evaluated using statistics based on Standard errors (SE), Normalized Mean Errors (NME) and Mean Multiplicative errors (MME). The SE and MME values for BOD and DO during calibration are, 1.41 (1.12) and1.28 (0.90), respectively. The values in the bracket show MME. Corresponding values for the validation are 1.27 (1.09) and 1.10 (0.96). These results show that the values predicted by the model are in close agreement with measured values.

The world’s population is increasing rapidly. This means that energy consumption and demand for energy are also increasing at the same rate. It is estimated that energy will need to be provided to 9 to 10 billion people by 2040. India is a leading consumer of energy in the world. In particular, it consumes a large amount of oil and natural gas to fulfil its energy demand. Due to uncertainty in the supply of oil and natural gas and their prices as well as environmental pollution, there is a need to shift towards other energy sources. Biomass is one of the first energy sources with specific properties and abundant availability. Today, 10% to 14% of the world’s energy supply is provided by biomass sources. Using agricultural waste (biomass) to make briquettes to generate power can be an alternative solution to the problems related to their disposal and pollution. The present work investigates the optimum ratio of dry sugarcane leaves to binders and optimum load and selects the best binder (cow dung, buffalo dung, and press mud) for making high-quality briquettes. The physical parameters and proximate analysis of the dry sugarcane leaf briquettes with the cow dung, buffalo dung, and press mud binders are investigated. The dry sugarcane leaf briquettes with the cow dung binder have the highest gross calorific value, net calorific value, split tensile strength, tumbling resistance, shatter resistance, and energy density ratio (16262.31 kJ/kg, 15362.1 kJ/kg, 7.164 kN/m2, 87.84%, 12.75%, and 0.9296, respectively). The estimated results show that cow dung is a better binder for making high-quality dry sugarcane leaf briquettes than the buffalo dung and press mud binders.