Independent Loops Selection in a Hydraulic Looped Network

As a preliminary important phase for a hydraulic network analysis procedure, loops identification process is studied in this paper by presenting an automated algorithm to select a set of independent loops for the network equilibrium. Through the presented study, the hydraulic network is modeled as an undirected graph edges-vertices. Also, to take into consideration the mechanical characteristics of the network, weights are assigned to pipes based on their hydraulic resistances. The assigned weights are taken as a selection criterion for loops identification. A numerical code under Matlab environment is generated and the established framework is tested on a set of real case networks. The obtained results are compared to those issued from previous researchers. Thus, the framework has proved its efficiency in identifying a set of independent loops even for complex network topologies. The mutual independence of the obtained loops is verified which allows to use the presented algorithm to build a general automated framework for water distribution network analysis.