Water consumption or water demand is the driving force behind the operation of a water distribution system. Anywhere water is used or leaves the system can be characterized as a demand on the system. It is critical to be able to characterize those uses or demands in order to develop a hydraulic or water quality model. It is important to be able to determine the amount of water being used, where it is being used, and how this usage varies with time (Walski et al., 2003).
We might categorize these demands as follows:
Baseline Demands. Baseline demands usually include consumer demands and unaccounted-for water and can often be acquired from a utility s existing records such as customer s meters and billing records. The spatial assignment of these demands is extremely important and should include the assignment of customer classes such as industrial, residential, and commercial use. Special types of uses such as water uses for schools must also be determined. It might be possible to use typical demands which have been developed for various types of uses. These values can be found in many text books and handbooks.
Demand Multipliers. Water use varies over time and varies with activities over the course of a day. When developing a steady-state model the baseline demand can be modified by multipliers in order to reflect some of the variations that occur in water systems. These include average day demand, the average rate of...
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