Transient Influence Zone Based Decomposition of Water Distribution Networks for Efficient Transient Analysis

Computational efficiency and accuracy of transient analysis for urban water distribution networks (WDN) become progressively important to the design and management of the system. In addition to the improvement of numerical model and computational capacity, which has been widely studied in the literature, efficient and accurate treatment of practical and complex WDN is another potential way to enhance the transient analysis. This paper aims to develop a zonal method for effective decomposition of WDN, which is mainly based on the transient sources and their influence regions in the system, in order to achieve efficient transient analysis. A concept of transient influence zone (TIZ) is firstly proposed and implemented to demonstrate the critical influence region of transient wave propagation in the system under specific design criteria. The obtained TIZ for each transient source is then mapped by introducing appropriate and equivalent boundaries so as to separate the TIZ from the entire WDN. To this end, the efficient Lagrangian model for prior-estimating pressure fluctuation extremes, the pressure fluctuation limitation for mapping TIZ borders and the quasi-reservoir condition for representing border boundaries are applied for characterizing the TIZs. A realistic network is adopted to demonstrate the applicability and accuracy of the proposed method. The application results and analysis indicate that the developed TIZ-based decomposition method provides a considerable efficiency improvement for transient analysis with sufficient modeling accuracy.