SOLVING PROBLEMS OF THREE RESERVOIRS INTERCONNECTED BY PIPESUSING A CODE IN PYTHON LANGUAGE

Abstract

This work consists of a contribution to the resolution of the problems related to the problems of three reservoirs which includes three different cases, namely: the calculation of flow rates, pipe sizes, and pressure head. Researchers proposed different solutions that start by imposing initial values and work through it to a balanced state using methods like predefined graphs or equations like Darcy-Weisbach and Colebrook-White. Despite their accuracy, users suggest fixed values of friction factor to solve the problem. The proposed python-based application solves all three cases utilizing three different methods Hager, Hazen-Williams, and RMM. The flow rate case is solved by a linear least squares regression to determine the exact values of pressure head and flow rates i=0; the pipe commercial diameters are selected from a set of predefined tables for the case of pipe sizing calculation and finally, the pressure head in the last case is considered as the average of heads computed for each pipe. The analysis of the study case presented in the paper illustrated that the differences between the original and the model’s results were significant (up to 30 l/s in terms of flow rates).