Epanet 2.0

Application for Modeling Drinking Water Distribution Systems

Working with Objects ¶. EPANET uses various types of objects to model a distribution system. These objects can be accessed either directly on the network map or from the Data page of the Browser window. This chapter describes what these objects are and how they can be created, selected, edited, deleted, and repositioned.

  • The interface for EPANET 2.0 was written in Delphi. To enable greater access for interested third parties to review and modify the EPANET GUI it was decided to re-write it in a language for which free compilers and other development tools are available.
  • Free download epanet 2.0. Education software downloads - EPANET by EPA's Water Supply and Water Resources Division and many more programs are available for instant and free download.

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EPANET is a software application used throughout the world to model water distribution systems. It was developed as a tool for understanding the movement and fate of drinking water constituents within distribution systems, and can be used for many different types of applications in distribution systems analysis. Today, engineers and consultants use EPANET to design and size new water infrastructure, retrofit existing aging infrastructure, optimize operations of tanks and pumps, reduce energy usage, investigate water quality problems, and prepare for emergencies. It can also be used to model contamination threats and evaluate resilience to security threats or natural disasters.

Software, Compatibility, and Manuals

EPANET is public domain software that can be freely copied and distributed. It is a Windows®-based program that will work with all versions of Windows. Continued development and bug fixes are occurring under an open source project site in GitHub. Software bugs and feature requests can be reported on the site as issues, and information is available for those interested in contributing to the code and/or viewing the quality assurance plan, contributor guidelines, software development roadmap, automated testing suite, and other information.

Software

Date

Description

07/23/2020Self-Extracting Installation Program for EPANET 2.2 (EXE)Exit(3.5 MB)
07/23/2020Exit(2.84 MB)
10/01/2018Self-Extracting Installation Program for EPANET 2.00.12 (EXE)(2 MB)

Toolkit and Extensions

Date

Description

07/23/2020EPANET 2.2 Programmer’s Toolkit Files (ZIP)Exit(847 KB)
03/20/2008EPANET 2 Programmer’s Toolkit files (ZIP)(253 K)
12/30/2011EPANET-MSX (Multi-Species eXtension)
10/01/2015EPANET-RTX (Real–Time eXtension)

Source Codes and Updates

Date

Description

07/23/2020EPANET 2.2 Source Code Files (ZIP)Exit(3 MB)
10/01/2018EPANET 2 Source Code Files (ZIP)(620 K)
07/23/2020EPANET 2.2 Updates (TXT)(3 K)
05/18/2020EPANET 2.0 Updates (TXT)

Manuals

Date

Description

07/23/2020
09/11/2000EPANET 2.0 User's Manual

Capabilities

With EPANET, users can perform extended-period simulation of the hydraulic and water quality behavior within pressurized pipe networks, which consist of pipes, nodes (junctions), pumps, valves, storage tanks, and reservoirs. It can be used to track the flow of water in each pipe, the pressure at each node, the height of the water in each tank, a chemical concentration, the age of the water, and source tracing throughout the network during a simulation period.

EPANET's user interface provides a visual network editor that simplifies the process of building pipe network models and editing their properties and data. Various data reporting and visualization tools are used to assist in interpreting the results of a network analysis, including color-coded network maps, data tables, energy usage, reaction, calibration, time series graphs, and profile and contour plots.

Hydraulic Modeling

Epanet 2.0

Full-featured and accurate hydraulic modeling is a prerequisite for doing effective water quality modeling. EPANET contains a state-of-the-art hydraulic analysis engine that includes the following capabilities:

  • Ability to use pressure dependent demands in hydraulic analyses.
  • System operation based on both simple tank level or timer controls and on complex rule-based controls.
  • No limit on the size of the network that can be analyzed.
  • Computes friction headloss using the Hazen-Williams, Darcy-Weisbach, or Chezy-Manning formulas.
  • Includes minor head losses for bends, fittings, etc.
  • Models constant or variable speed pumps.
  • Computes pumping energy and cost.
  • Models various types of valves, including shutoff, check, pressure regulating, and flow control.
  • Allows storage tanks to have any shape (i.e., diameter can vary with height).
  • Considers multiple demand categories at nodes, each with its own pattern of time variation.
  • Models pressure-dependent flow issuing from emitters (sprinkler heads).
  • Provides robust results for hydraulic convergence and low/zero flow conditions.

Water Quality Modeling

In addition to hydraulic modeling, EPANET provides the following water quality modeling capabilities:

  • Storage tanks as being either complete mix, plug flow, or two-compartment reactors.
  • Movement of a non-reactive tracer material through the network over time.
  • Movement and fate of a reactive material as it grows or decays with time.
  • Age of water throughout a network.
  • Percent of flow from a given node reaching all other nodes over time.
  • Reactions in the bulk flow and at the pipe wall.
  • Accounts for mass transfer limitations when modeling pipe wall reactions.
  • Allows growth or decay reactions to proceed up to a limiting concentration.
  • Employs global reaction rate coefficients that can be modified on a pipe-by-pipe basis.
  • Allows wall reaction rate coefficients to be correlated to pipe roughness.
  • Allows for time-varying concentration or mass inputs at any location in the network.

Water Security and Resilience Modeling

Extensions to EPANET are available that work with the existing software to simulate the interactions between multiple chemical and biological agents and their interactions with the bulk water and pipe walls in water distribution systems.

  • EPANET-MSX (Multi-Species eXtension) enables EPANET to model complex reactions between multiple chemical and biological species in both the bulk flow and at the pipe wall. This capability has been included into both a stand-alone executable program as well as a toolkit library of functions that programmers can use to build customized applications. EPANET-MSX allows users the flexibility to model a wide-range of chemical reactions of interest, including, auto-decomposition of chloramines to ammonia, the formation of disinfection byproducts, biological regrowth, combined reaction rate constants in multi-source systems, and mass transfer limited oxidation-pipe wall adsorption reactions.
  • EPANET-RTX (Real–Time eXtension) provides the methods and software tools by which operational data can be connected with a network infrastructure model, and the resulting network simulation model can be calibrated, verified, and continually tested for accuracy using operational data. EPANET-RTX is software for building real-time hydraulic and water quality models. EPANET-RTX brings real-time analytics to water distribution system modeling, planning, and operations. Analytics refer to the discovery and interpretation of patterns in data. EPANET-RTX software works by providing access accessing available utility data and effectively using it to run a hydraulic and water quality model.

Programmer's Toolkit

This toolkit is a dynamic link library (DLL) of functions that allow developers to customize EPANET to their own needs. The functions can be incorporated into 32-bit Windows applications written in C/C++, Visual Basic, or any other language that can call functions within a Windows DLL. There are over 50 functions that can be used to open a network description file, read and modify various network design and operating parameters, run multiple extended-period simulations accessing results as they are generated or saving them to file, and write selected results to a file in a user-specified format.

The toolkit is useful for developing specialized applications, such as optimization or automated calibration models that require running many network analyses. It can simplify adding analysis capabilities to integrated network-modeling environments based on computer-aided design (CAD), geographical information system (GIS), and database packages. A Windows Help file is available to explain how to use the various toolkit functions. It offers some simple programming examples. The toolkit also includes several different header files, function definition files, and .lib files that simplify the task of interfacing it with code.

Applications

EPANET helps water utilities maintain and improve the quality of water delivered to consumers. It can be used for the following:

  • Design sampling programs
  • Study disinfectant loss and byproduct formations
  • Conduct consumer exposure assessments
  • Evaluate alternative strategies for improving water quality
  • Modify pumping and tank filling/emptying schedules to reduce water age
  • Use booster disinfection stations at key locations to maintain target residuals
  • Plan and improve a system's hydraulic performance
  • Assist with pipe, pump, and valve placement and sizing
  • Energy minimization
  • Fire flow analysis
  • Vulnerability studies

Related Resources

Technical Support

  • Questions or comments: Contact us about EPANET

Published June 22, 2020

Epanet 2.0 Free Download

Protecting and maintaining drinking water distribution systems is crucial to ensuring high quality drinking water. The purpose of a water distribution system is to deliver water to consumers with appropriate quality, quantity, and pressure, from its source to the point of use. The optimal management of these systems requires data and information, including a digital model of the water system depicting its pipes, valves, pumps, tanks, and other attributes.

EPANET was developed by EPA in the 1990s to better understand water quality transport processes in drinking water distribution systems. Dr. Lewis Rossman, an environmental engineer, created EPANET, a user-friendly software application for modeling the hydraulic and water quality behavior of distribution systems. Since then, EPANET has been used by water utilities engineers, consultants, government officials, and academics in the United States and around the world to help design, manage, and understand water systems. EPANET is also used to model contamination threats and evaluate resilience to security threats or natural disasters.

The first official release of EPANET 2 was version 2.00.05 on June 1, 2000. Between 2000 and 2008, EPA published six significant updates for EPANET. However, more frequent updates are increasingly needed; as well as efforts to modernize the EPANET code base and add the many improvements the research community had developed and published. EPANET is becoming a more widely used and relied upon modeling software tool nationally and world-wide. With only a few EPA scientists well versed on detailed functions of EPANET, they are unable single-handedly, to provide timely software updates.

“With EPA’s last official release of EPANET occurring in 2008, it has become increasingly more difficult for EPA to maintain and advance EPANET on a regular basis and meet the needs of the EPANET community,” said Robert Janke, EPA research scientist and EPANET project officer.

Epanet 2.0

In 2015, the Water Distribution System Analysis (WDSA) Standing Committee voted to initiate an open source software project for the continued development of EPANET. This committee is a part of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) - a technical institute of the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers. With the announcement of an open source EPANET initiative, the project indicated that it would be owned and managed by the wider WDSA community without affiliation to any private or public for-profit institution or company. In so doing, software developers from EPA and the water community came together via the community organization and forum, Open Water Analytics (OWA), to form and promote an initiative for an open source EPANET. This is a community-organized initiative to maintain and extend EPANET in the public domain. The EPANET developers’ community at OWA is composed of dedicated volunteers from around the world who have a passion for EPANET.

The recently released EPANET 2.2.0 would not have been possible without the dedicated community of volunteer software developers at OWA. EPA’s release of EPANET 2.2.0 represents a collaboration with the WDSA Standing Committee of the EWRI and the community at OWA. It also represents a new, community-based open source software approach to maintaining and advancing EPANET. EPANET 2.2.0 includes numerous substantial improvements over the former version. These include updates to the hydraulic and water quality engines by providing faster, more accurate, and more robust results compared to its predecessor. Everyone is welcome to participate in the EPANET project. Whether helping others to resolve issues, reporting a new unknown issue, suggesting a new feature that would benefit a workflow, or writing code, EPA value’s and appreciate the time and effort of all contributors. The path for contribution starts with entering an issue at https://github.com/OpenWaterAnalytics/EPANET/issues. Examine the open issues at this link and the conversation around them, and then get engaged!

EPANET 2.2.0 provides an updated and expanded open source water distribution system modeling tool to meet the vastly important needs of water utilities and the water community.

Epanet 2.0 Tutorial Pdf

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