Physical and Computational Modeling of Mixing Processes in Potable Water Network Junctions

Water quality in potable water distribution systems has been especially studied from the point of view of mixing processes in network junctions. Programs such as EPANET usually assume that there is complete mixing. However, researchers such as Romero-Gómez et al.have questioned this assumption and conducted a series of experiments which showed mixing within nodes isn’t actually complete. In the present research, we witnessed that mixture processes depend on contact as well as physical and temporal interaction between incident flows. This may vary according to entry flow relation but also according to the junction’s configuration type and its internal geometry. A physical modeling was conducted at a Hydraulic Laboratory in Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. A computational modeling was also done, and it used the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methodology in order to simulate different node configurations. Qualitative and quantitative experiments were conducted for the physical modeling; for the first case, we used potassium permanganate as tracer and for the later we measured chlorine concentration in all pipes.