Simulating Control Valves in Water Distribution Systems as Pipes of Variable Resistance

Abstract

This paper presents a simple valve simulation method integrable into the global gradient algorithm (GGA), which is widely used in hydraulic analysis of water distribution systems. In the proposed method, valves are treated as pipes whose resistance is adjusted in the course of the GGA iteration to meet the valve setting. This method features a unified approach to pressure control and flow control valves. Comparison tests on example networks have shown that the proposed method computes the same results as an independent optimization-based method in a comparable number of iterations and copes with the cases where EPANET 2 produces incorrect results. The proposed method may easily be integrated into existing GGA-based hydraulic solvers, in particular into that of EPANET 2.