Modeling and Optimizing Hydraulic Transients in Water Distribution Systems

AbstractA hydraulic transient is the means by which a rapid change in steady-state flow is absorbed. Although maltreatment of transient processes can result in disasters, engineers in most cases attain solutions through enumerating possible surge scenarios and less through optimization. In this study both classical (a Quasi-Newton algorithm) and heuristic (a genetic algorithm) methods were used to minimize the transient resulted from valve closure in simple water distribution networks. The results show that even for smallest transients, utilization of optimization can substantially reduce the negative effects of transients