AN EFFICIENT METHOD FOR QUASI-TWO-DIMENSIONAL WATER-HAMMER SIMULATION

In order to increase the computational efficiency of quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) water-hammer models, a method that improves upon an existing quasi-2D scheme in the method of characteristics (MOC) is presented. The proposed method uses one-dimensional (1D) explicit equations to calculate pressure head and discharge, rather than using numerical integration to solve mean velocity as employed in the existing scheme. The 1D explicit equations are developed, based on the flux vector splitting (FVS) method. In a reservoir-pipeline-valve system, the comparisons between the proposed method and two existing quasi-2D schemes show that the proposed method gives virtually the same results as the other two quasi-2D schemes do, but costs less computational time. Therefore, the proposed method is able to simulate transient flow problems with high accuracy and efficiency.