Hydraulic Analysis of Water Distribution Systems Based on Fixed Point Iteration Method

Water distribution systems with complex configurations are important urban facilities and the hydraulic analysis is essential for system design, optimization and management. Hydraulic analysis involves the procedure of calculating the hydraulic parameters of nodal pressure heads and pipe flow rates under steady-state condition. The equations governing the heads and flows are nonlinear and the most popular method for solving the equations is the Newton-Raphson method, which is the basis of existing hydraulic simulator (EPANET 2). In this paper, fixed point iteration method is proposed for hydraulic analysis after transformation of the original nonlinear equations. Compared to EPANET 2, the proposed method can analyze a water distribution system without differentiation for the convergence for some problems which cannot be solved by EPANET 2. Three test networks were analyzed by the proposed method and EPANET 2. It is proved that the proposed method could get the convergence after a series of iterations, even in cases that EPANET 2 fail. And the initial values of nodal pressure heads and the specified calculation accuracy are considered to have influences on the calculation procedure.