Adding Multispecies Water Quality Reactions to Resilience Modeling Tools
Citation:
Hart, D., K. Klise, J. Burkhardt, AND T. Haxton. Adding Multispecies Water Quality Reactions to Resilience Modeling Tools. 2024 World Environmental & Water Resources Congress, Milwaukee, WI, May 19 - 22, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
Drinking water systems face multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure, water quality concerns, uncertainty in supply and demand, natural disasters, environmental emergencies, and terrorist attacks. All of these have the potential to disrupt a large portion of a water system causing damage to infrastructure and outages to customers. Increasing resilience to these types of hazards is essential to improving water security. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) is a Python package allowing for end-to-end evaluation of drinking water infrastructure resilience to disasters. The software improves upon EPANET's capabilities by fully integrating hydraulic and water quality simulation, damage estimates and response actions, and resilience metrics into a single platform. This tool is important for drinking water systems around the world who want to better understand how their water systems can withstand natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and power outages. This presentation provides an update of WNTR to include the EPANET-MSX 2.0 toolbox to simulate the reaction dynamics of multiple water constituents during a resilience analysis.
Description:
The resilience of a drinking water distribution system can be associated with both the hydraulics and water quality of the system. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) relied on the water quality component of EPANET 2.2 to track and transport a single species within the distribution system, such as a conservative tracer or disinfectant decay. An updated version of EPANET-MSX (multi-species extension) was recently released that simulates the advection, dispersion, and reaction of multiple, interacting biological and chemical species. This type of multi-species modeling has become particularly important as issues like disinfection by-products, lead, and system contamination have gained renewed focus and concern but might not be easily or correctly modeled with the single species limit within EPANET. The EPANET-MSX 2.0 toolkit has now been integrated into WNTR. Additionally, a library of different chemical reactions has been made available in WNTR with the MSX extension to more easily store, organize, and track the citations of the available reaction models. This extension supplements the existing WNTR capabilities and enables multi-species water quality impacts to be directly incorporated into the resilience analysis. In this presentation, we provide an overview of these recent updates to WNTR and highlight how it can be used in future research.