ANALYSIS OF WATER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Abstract

Water that we are using in our day to day activity is transported and distributed to each and every individual house through conveyance system. This distribution system consists of pipes, values, pumps and distribution reservoir. The design of water distribution system consists of optimization of the system and network flow analysis. Water distribution network analysis is based on the principles of flow continuity at junction and conservation of energy around loop. Also head loss is a function of flow rates. There are a number of solution strategies; and computer programs exist that can perform this task but improvement in solution speed and uniqueness still remains. As mentioned above, there are different approaches to pipe network analysis, i.e., Hardy-Cross (1936), Linear Theory (Wood and Charles 1972), Optimization Technique (Collins et al. 1978) and Network Linear Programming (Bergout and Kuczera 1977). These methods are described in the literature and all the methods have been tested using Hazen Williams and Darcy Wiesbach headloss formula. In the present study the performance of various methods has been done. The number of iterations appears to be dependent on the size of network. In addition, analysis of system content is useful to evaluate the performance of various methods.