To solve water hammer problems in pipeline systems,many numerical simulation approaches have been developed. This paper improves a flux vector splitting( FVS) scheme whose grid is the same as the fixedgrid MOC scheme. The proposed FVS scheme is used to analyze water hammer problems caused by a pump abrupt shutdown in a pumping system with an air vessel. This paper also proposes a pump-valve-vessel model combining a pump-valve model with an air vessel model. The results show that the data obtained by the FVS scheme are similar to the ones obtained by the fixed-grid method of characteristics( MOC). And the results using the pump-valve-vessel model are almost the same as the ones using both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model. Therefore,it is effective that the proposed FVS scheme is used to solve water hammer problems and the pump-valve-vessel model replaces both the pump-valve model and the air vessel model to simulate water hammer flows in the pumping system with the air vessel.
The features of a quasi-two-dimensional( quasi-2D) model for simulating two-phase water hammer flows with vaporous cavity in a pipe are investigated. The quasi-2D model with discrete vaporous cavity in the pipe is proposed in this paper. This model uses the quasi-2D model for pure liquid zone and one-dimensional( 1D) discrete vapor cavity model for vaporous cavity zone. The quasi-2D model solves two-dimensional equations for both axial and radial velocities and 1D equations for both pressure head and discharge by the method of characteristics. The 1D discrete vapor cavity model is used to simulate the vaporous cavity occurred when the pressure in the local pipe is lower than the vapor pressure of the liquid. The proposed model is used to simulate two-phase water flows caused by the rapid downstream valve closure in a reservoir-pipe-valve system.The results obtained by the proposed model are compared with those by the corresponding 1D model and the experimental ones provided by the literature,respectively. The comparison shows that the maximum pressure heads simulated by the proposed model are more accurate than those by the corresponding 1D model.
The quasi-2D model, taking into account the axial velocity profile in the cross section and neglecting the convective term in the 2-D equation, can more accurately simulate the water hammer than the 1-D model using the cross-sectional mean velocity. However, as compared with the 1-D model, the quasi-2D model bears a higher computational burden. In order to improve the computational efficiency, the 1-D method is proposed to be used to solve directly the pressure head and the discharge in the quasi-2D model in this paper, based on the fact that the pressure head obtained as the solution of the two-dimensional characteristic equation is identical to that solved by the 1-D characteristic equations. The proposed scheme solves directly the 1-D characteristic equations for the pressure head and the discharge using the MOC and solves the 2-D characteristic equation for the axial velocities in order to calculate the wall shear stress. If the radial velocity is needed, it can be evaluated easily by an explicit equation derived from the explicit 2-D characteristic equation. In the numerical test, the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed scheme are compared with two existing quasi-two-dimensional models using the MOC. It is shown that the proposed scheme has the same accuracy as the two quasi-2D models, but requires less computational time. Therefore, it is efficient to use the proposed scheme to simulate the 2-D water hammer flows.
