Uniformly Distributed Demand EPANET Extension

Abstract

EPANET-2 is a popular public domain package widely used to determine flow in Water Distribution Networks (WDN) in Extended Period Simulation (EPS). In its original formulation the water demand is represented as lumped withdrawals at network nodes. However, this approximation may introduce significant errors in the hydraulic head distribution, since energy balance is not respected at the level of the single edge (pipe). To overcome this drawback we propose a new implementation of EPANET-2 with the water demand uniformly distributed along the pipes. This new formulation obeys energy balance but introduces significant changes in the system of equations, which is therefore solved by introducing a proper relaxation factor in the Global Gradient Algorithm (GGA) implemented in the original version of the software. This new version of the software, we named DD-EPANET, produces an accurate representation of pressure distribution and allows to identify accurately the point of minimum head also when it is located within an edge of the network. The new scheme is suitable for long term simulations in particular for calibration and optimization of WDNs, in particular when data on water demand are scarce.