Professor Auburn University, Alabama, United States
Abstract Submission: The operation of drinking water systems often requires emptying and refilling closed conduits, particularly when maintenance is needed or following failure episodes. Understanding air-water interactions and predicting air pressurization in the context of pipe filling for such complex topologies is a standing challenge for hydraulic engineers. Different modeling tools have been developed to attempt the representation of the refilling of water distribution systems, ranging from 1-D models that disregard air phase effects to sophisticated 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models that explicitly track and represent air phase motion, compression, and release. A limitation of CFD tools in this context is the scalability to be applied in actual geometries, as they require a large amount of modeling setup and computational effort to perform their simulations. Our research explores 1D approaches that can represent complex topologies, mixed flow conditions, and air pressurization through a combination of two open-source tools – EPANET and SWMM. The methodology integrates these two hydraulic models simultaneously to predict air and water parameters in a simplified way, serving as a preliminary study for cases such as priming of water distribution systems or rapid filling of sewer lines applied to large-scale systems. This presentation describes the general approaches that will be taken to integrate the models to represent the filling of simple water distribution network geometries.
