Assessment of Variations in Nodal Demand Satisfaction of Water Distribution Networks

Abstract

Nodal demand satisfaction is one of the means to assess the performance of a Water Distribution Network (WDN). In most of the developing countries, the public water supply systems are not capable of meeting consumer demands. In such situations it is more appropriate to observe deviations in nodal demand satisfaction. Through this paper a new parameter named Uniformity Coefficient is suggested to quantify these variations and a methodology is developed to estimate UC values for a network. Further, Demand Driven Analysis of WDN does not give a clear picture of rate of supply, which leads to erroneous performance evaluation of WDNs. A modification of the nodal discharges based on source head available and desirable and minimum source head required for each node is presented in this paper. A program was developed in ‘C’ language using EPANET- Toolkit. Simulation studies were conducted on different networks using this program.