The Never Ending Story of Modeling Control-Devices in Hydraulic Systems Analysis

Difficulties of simulation in existing hydraulic models arising from combinations of pressure and flow controlling devices in water distribution systems have been discussed in a number of previous papers. For instance, examples for non-convergence or wrong results of the hydraulic solver EPANET (version 2.00.10) were first published by Simpson in 1999. It may be shown that the problems were caused by a singularity of the equation system that appears if in an iteration two interacting control devices are active at the same time. In terms of graph theory the part of the network between the two active valves in this case is disconnected from the rest of the system leading to the singularity. In the new EPANET version 2.00.12 that has been released recently this problem is tackled by adding a virtual coefficient to all matrix columns and rows corresponding to nodes of active flow control valves. Mathematically this method is equivalent to adding a very small diameter pipe to the actual network in parallel to the FCV resulting in a nonsingular system. The examples of networks published by Simpson (1999) where EPANET 2.00.10 failed to converge or converged to wrong results now can be solved successfully. Nevertheless the latest release of EPANET still has difficulties in modeling of combinations of control devices. Whereas the former version of EPANET (version 2.00.10) often failed to calculate the correct valve states (active, closed, open) the problems of the new version consist of numerical inexactness that is caused by the addition of the virtual matrix terms for FCVs. In addition examples can be found where version 2.00.12 of EPANET still fails to converge.