EPANET

Application for Modeling Drinking Water

Distribution Systems

EPANET is used throughout the world to model water distribution systems. This software
application is used to perform extended-period simulation of the hydraulic and water quality
behavior within pressurized pipe networks, which consist of pipes, nodes (junctions), pumps,
valves, storage tanks, and reservoirs. It can be used to track the flow of water in each pipe, the
pressure at each node, the height of the water in each tank, a chemical concentration, the age of
the water, and source tracing throughout the network during a simulation period.

EPANET was developed as a tool for understanding the movement and fate of drinking water
constituents within distribution systems, and can be used for many different kinds of applications
in distribution systems analysis. Today, engineers and consultants use EPANET to design and
size new water infrastructure, retrofit existing aging infrastructure, optimize operations of tanks
and pumps, reduce energy usage, investigate water quality problems, and prepare for
emergencies. It can also be used to model contamination threats and evaluate resilience to
security threats or natural disasters. EPANET's user interface provides a visual network editor
that simplifies the process of building piping network models and editing their properties and
data.

 Modeling Capabilities
EPANET's user interface provides a visual network editor that simplifies the process of
building pipe network models and editing their properties and data. Various data
reporting and visualization tools are used to assist in interpreting the results of a network
analysis, including color-coded network maps, data tables, energy usage, reaction,
calibration, time series graphs, and profile and contour plots.

Hydraulic Modeling. Full-featured and accurate hydraulic modeling is a prerequisite for

doing effective water quality modeling. EPANET contains a state-of-the-art hydraulic
analysis engine that includes the following capabilities:

o System operation based on both simple tank level or timer controls and on
complex rule-based controls.
o No limit on the size of the network that can be analyzed.
o Computes friction headloss using the Hazen-Williams, Darcy-Weisbach, or
Chezy-Manning formulas.
o Includes minor head losses for bends, fittings, etc.
o Models constant or variable speed pumps.
o Computes pumping energy and cost 10.
o Models various types of valves, including shutoff, check, pressure regulating, and
flow control.
o Allows storage tanks to have any shape (i.e., diameter can vary with height).
o Considers multiple demand categories at nodes, each with its own pattern of time
variation.
o Models pressure-dependent flow issuing from emitters (sprinkler heads).

Water Quality Modeling. In addition to hydraulic modeling, EPANET provides the

following water quality modeling capabilities:

o Storage tanks as being either complete mix, plug flow, or two-compartment

reactors.
o Movement of a non-reactive tracer material through the network over time.
 o Movement and fate of a reactive material as it grows or decays with time.
o Age of water throughout a network.
o Percent of flow from a given node reaching all other nodes over time.
o Reactions in the bulk flow and at the pipe wall.
o Accounts for mass transfer limitations when modeling pipe wall reactions.
o Allows growth or decay reactions to proceed up to a limiting concentration.
o Employs global reaction rate coefficients that can be modified on a pipe-by-pipe
basis.
o Allows wall reaction rate coefficients to be correlated to pipe roughness.
o Allows for time-varying concentration or mass inputs at any location in the
network.

Water Security and Resilience Modeling. Extensions to EPANET are available that
work with the existing software to simulate the interactions between multiple chemical
and biological agents and their interactions with the bulk water and pipe walls in water
distribution systems.

 Extensions and Toolkit

EPANET-MSX (Multi-Species eXtension) enables EPANET to model complex

reactions between multiple chemical and biological species in both the bulk flow and at
the pipe wall. This capability has been included into both a stand-alone executable
program as well as a toolkit library of functions that programmers can use to build
customized applications. EPANET-MSX allows users the flexibility to model a wide-
range of chemical reactions of interest, including, auto-decomposition of chloramines to
ammonia, the formation of disinfection byproducts, biological regrowth, combined
reaction rate constants in multi-source systems, and mass transfer limited oxidation-pipe
wall adsorption reactions.

EPANET-RTX (Real–Time eXtension) provides the methods and software tools by

which operational data can be connected with a network infrastructure model, and the
resulting network simulation model can be calibrated, verified, and continually tested for
accuracy using operational data. EPANET-RTX is software for building real-time
hydraulic and water quality models. EPANET-RTX brings real-time analytics to water
distribution system modeling, planning, and operations. Analytics refer to the discovery
and interpretation of patterns in data. EPANET-RTX software works by providing
access accessing available utility data and effectively using it to run a hydraulic and water
quality model.

Programmer's Toolkit is a dynamic link library (DLL) of functions that allow

developers to customize EPANET to their own needs. The functions can be incorporated
into 32-bit Windows applications written in C/C++, Visual Basic, or any other language
that can call functions within a Windows DLL. There are over 50 functions that can be
used to open a network description file, read and modify various network design and
operating parameters, run multiple extended-period simulations accessing results as they
are generated or saving them to file, and write selected results to a file in a user-specified
format.

The toolkit is useful for developing specialized applications, such as optimization or

automated calibration models that require running many network analyses. It can simplify
adding analysis capabilities to integrated network-modeling environments based on
computer-aided design (CAD), geographical information system (GIS), and database
packages. A Windows Help file is available to explain how to use the various toolkit
functions. It offers some simple programming examples. The toolkit also includes several
different header files, function definition files, and .lib files that simplify the task of
interfacing it with code.
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endorsement by EPA. EPA and its employees do not endorse any commercial products,
services, or enterprises.