SENARIET, A Water Hammer Software for Analyzing Hydraulic Transients in Complex Circuits

Abstract

Water hammer transients are a danger for piping integrity and represent an important safety issue. In the design of pipeline systems it is necessary to take into account the magnitudes of pressure waves associated with water hammer phenomena and, therefore, it is important that these water hammer effects are calculated with the appropriate accuracy. SENARIET is a programme to study fluid transients in pipeline systems to obtain pressure and velocity distributions along a circuit. When a transient process occurs in periods of the same order of the pressure waves’ travelling time along a circuit (the order of the circuit length divided by the effective propagation speed), the compressibility effects in liquids have to be considered. Taking this effect into account, the appropriate equations of continuity and momentum are solved by the method of characteristics, to obtain pressure and velocity along pipes as a function of time. The programme considers different devices that usually take part in complex circuits, such as pumps, motorized valves, check valves, elbows, change of sections, bifurcations, vacuum valves, damping devices, reservoirs, etc. The simulated results have been compared to theoretical and experimental ones to validate and evaluate the precision of the software. The results help to perform efficient and accurate predictions in order to define the pipelines.