Aqualibrium Competition: Laboratory Data and EPAnet Simulations

The Aqualibrium competition [1] is a fun way to learn about water supply and distribution. A pipe network has to be built with the aim of equally distributing a given volume of water between three reservoirs. The rules of such a competition prescribe that a looped network has to be built and this makes the problem quite complex because of the well-known non-linearity of the governing equations. EPAnet is a powerful tool to improve and fasten the solution of the problem. At the Water Engineering Laboratory (WEL) of the University of Perugia an Aqualibrium equipment is used within the Civil Engineering courses. EPAnet was used to simulate the behaviour of the Aqualibrium network, but the results showed some discrepancies between laboratory tests and numerical simulations under some flow conditions. These discrepancies, as well as the critical role played by energy dissipation mechanism, are discussed in this paper.