Incorporating the FAVAD Leakage Equation into Water Distribution System Analysis

The standard formulation of the hydraulic network equations incorporates a power function for modeling pressure-dependent consumption such as leakage. However, recent research has shown that the FAVAD leakage model more accurately accounts for the behavior of leaks in practice. The objective of this paper is to propose a method for solving the hydraulic network equations incorporating the FAVAD model. An energy minimization problem is used to prove the existence and the uniqueness of the solution to this problem, and to provide the basis for a robust solver. A damped Newton algorithm is proposed for solving the system equations.