Assessment of water quality using WQI and prediction of WQI using ANN in some selected coastal villages of Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh

Department of Chemistry MV GR College of Engineering (A), Vijayaramnagar Campus, Chintalavalasa,

Vizianagaram-535 005, Andhra Pradesh, India

E-mail : prs_ganti@yahoo.co.in, sarathitirumala@gmail.com, svr.kondrotu@gmail.com

Manuscript received online 05 October 2016, accepted 13 December 2016

The present paper is aimed at the assessment of water quality of ground water using Water Quality Index (WQI) method. Seven coastal villages of Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh were selected for the present study. Various physico-chemical parameters such as pH, EC, TDS, THW, Ca, Mg, Na, K, Cl, F, nitrite were analyzed for the samples collected. From such data WQI values were computed and it was concluded that the ground water of the villages under study was rated as “poor” in its quality. Artificial Neural networks tool in MATLAB was adopted and the feedback propagation and TRAINGLM program was used to predict the water quality of the ground water using WQI. The ANN predicted WQI values were found to be well in accordance with the experimentally computed values. A relative error of 0.15% between the predicted and experimentally computed values was observed. The regression coefficient values for testing and validation of the program was well within the prescribed limits.