A Novel EPANET Integration for the Diffusive–Dispersive Transport of Contaminants

Abstract

The EPANET model is commonly used to model hydraulic behaviour and water quality within water distribution networks. The standard version of the model solves the advective transport equation by solving a mass balance of the fundamental plug flow substance that considers the advective transport and kinetic reaction processes. Over the years, several versions of the model have been developed, which have made it possible to improve the modelling of water quality through the introduction of additional terms within the transport equation to solve the problem of dispersive transport (EPANET-AZRED) and to consider multiple interacting species in the mass flow and on the pipe walls (EPANET multi-species extension). The present study proposes a novel integration of the EPANET-DD (dynamic-dispersion) model, which enables the advective–diffusive–dispersive transport equation in dynamic flow conditions to be solved in the two-dimensional case, through the classical random walk method, implementing the diffusion and dispersion equations proposed by Romero-Gomez and Choi (2011). The model was applied to the University of Enna “KORE” laboratory network to verify its effectiveness in modelling diffusive–dispersive transport mechanisms in the presence of variable flow regimes. The results showed that the EPANET-DD model could better represent the actual data than previously developed versions of the EPANET model.