Hydraulic transient evaluation via fabricable impedance matrix for pipe networks

Abstract

A novel analysis method is proposed to evaluate the impact of specified components in a pipe network on the severity of transient events. A new structural scheme for the impedance matrix was developed to ensure the feasibility of compartmental unsteady analyses, which can be useful for complex pipe networks with different pipeline elements. The impact of a specific pipeline element or a designated section with multiple elements on the transient response can be obtained by delineating the subtracted frequency response between a specific hydraulic impedance of the complete network and that of the missing element. A hypothetical pipe network was introduced to validate the developed method. The impacts of pipeline elements on the total transient response were perfectly matched between the subtraction of time domain responses and direct computation using the identified frequency response function. The transient relaxing impact of additional pipeline elements can be considered for the design of pipe networks.