Hydraulic Analysis of Water Supply Networks Using a Modified Hardy Cross Method

There are different methods for the hydraulic analysis of water supply networks. In the solution process of most of these methods, a large system of linear equations is solved in each iteration. This usually requires a high computational effort. Hardy Cross method is one of the approaches that do not need such a process and may converge to the solution through scalar divisions. However, this method has two shortcomings: first, initial discharges should satisfy continuity equation at each node; second a large number of iterations are required to converge to solution. In this article an algorithm is suggested for initial discharges that are close to the final results while the continuity equations are automatically established. This algorithm may be directly implemented in the Hardy Cross method. To reduce the number of iterations the Hardy Cross method is combined with third-order and sixteenth-order methods. The results of some numerical examples demonstrate that the use of the combined approach with the suggested initial guess reduces the number of iterations and hydraulic analysis time and the solutions converge with a high accuracy.