A New Method for Numerical Prediction of Liquid Column Separation Accompanying Hydraulic Transients in Pipelines

The paper presents a new method for calculating pressure fluctuations in pipelines during a water hammer with liquid column separation. The method is based on the discrete-vapor-cavity model which assumes that vaporous cavities are formed in every computational section of the pipeline whenever the pressure drops to the vapor pressure at a given temperature. The method brings a significant improvement in prediction reliability as compared with the methods known so far. It eliminates disadvantages of basic methods used in practice — this is proved by comparisons between calculations made for several study cases. It is expected that the proposed method will become the main method in commercial codes used for simulating water hammer with the liquid column separation.