Temporal Scale Consideration for Water Quality Modeling in Municipal Distribution Systems

Random intermittent laminar flow is common in the periphery of a municipal distribution system. The Poisson Rectangular Pulse (PRP) process is employed to generate realistic residential water demands. These demands are converted into sequences of random intermittent laminar flows, statistically identical to flows through a typical pipe in a peripheral zone of the network. The intermittent laminar flow sequence is used to drive unsteady transport of a conservative solute through the pipe network. Adopting a high-resolution two-dimensional advection-diffusion model as the benchmark, a one-dimensional advection-dispersion model is compared to examine the effect of the temporal averaging scale and the initial dispersive condition on the spread of the solute cloud.