6 E. CABRERA ET AL.

c) A slow vanatIon in the system's working conditions such as the change in

consumption along the day, causes small changes with time in the pipes flow rate and
therefore the inertial effects are negligible. The quasi-static model (or extended period
simulation) is the most suitable model for this analysis.

d) Static models can only analyze steady states well defined as a response to a given
consumption in the network. In fact the quasi-static model is just the superposition of
the different static simulations in time, with different loads (say consumptions) and
boundaries (say water level's tank) in the same way than the moving image of a movie
can be obtained by superimposing sequentially static images very close, between them,
in time.

As it will be seen later the equations that characterize the behaviour of the fluid flow
in the network, including more or less terms, are the ones which will give rise to a
given model.

A lot of commercial computer programs can be found for practical analysis. Static
models, which generally allow extended period analysis (quasi-static models) are the best
known. This is due to the fact that the daily network management (analysis, design and
operation) can be solved, from an engineering point of view, with this kind of models.

However, rigid models developed for commercial purposes are very rare, despite their
mathematical formulations are not much more complex that the static one (Holloway
M.B et al.(1988), Chaudhry (1992. The reason is that in practice the inherent errors in
the basic data can be much more significant than the improved accuracy of results
achieved using the rigid model instead of the quasi-static model.

A comparison between both models is presented by Chaudhry et al.( 1995) in this

Course, ( see Chapter 16).

The applicability of the elastic model is, however, unquestionable for analyzing sudden
changes and/or extreme situations. This explains why commercial packages based on
elastic models are also abundant. The focus of these problems are main pipes and
therefore these models analyze very simplified networks. Furthermore, more
complementary parameters are required with respect to the previous models (network
elastic parameters) and, on the other hand, paramount data in static analysis lose their
influence in the final results (for example friction in pipes). That, and the higher
mathematical complexity of this problem, explains why the inertial elastic model, or
water hammer, is not used in practice as an envelope of the three previous models.