Water distribution network (WDN) models account for customer-demands as water withdrawals concentrated in nodes. Customer- demands can be assumed to be constant or varying with nodal head/pressure entailing demand-driven or pressure-driven simulation, respec- tively. In both cases, the direct connection of customer properties to the hydraulic system is implicitly assumed. Nonetheless, in many technical situations, the service pipe fills a local private storage (e.g., a roof tank or a basement tank) from which the water is actually delivered to customers by gravity or pumping systems. In such contexts, the service pipe fills the local tank by means of a top orifice. Consequently, what is really connected to the hydraulic system is a tank, which is subject to a filling/emptying process while supplying water to customers. Therefore, since modeling this technical situation in WDN analyses is necessary, the paper develops a formulation for nodal water withdrawals in WDN models accounting for the filling/emptying process of inline tanks between the hydraulic network and customers. The formulation is also introduced in a widely used method for steady-state WDN modeling, the global gradient algorithm, and its effectiveness to increase the hydraulic accuracy of results is discussed using a simple case study and a small network. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE) HY.1943-7900.0000812. © 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers. Author keywords: Tank modeling; Water distribution networks; Hydraulic network modeling; Water distribution network simulation; Extended period simulation.
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