Determination of the corresponding roughness height in a WDS model containing old rough pipes

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the paper was to determine the influence of irregular pipe wall roughness on the flow velocity in a water distribution system (WDS) containing old pipes. Field studies have shown that due to pipe wall build-up, the shape of the inner pipe surface can vary temporally and spatially. This will lead to unrealistic pipe roughness values when calibrating the WDS model using nominal pipe diameters. Therefore, in this study, three types of pipe wall build-up were investigated using EPANET2 and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to estimate the velocity correction coefficients for EPANET2 calculations. It was shown that in old rough pipes, the mean velocities are higher than expected, indicating that in water quality estimation in a WDS, actual pipe diameters with reasonable roughness need to be defined.