Consumers

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Consumers withdraw as well as discharge water. They can be interpreted as municipal or industrial water works with connecting supply grid. Consumers require potable water or water for other uses and discharge it back into a natural system (e.g. river) through the sewer system and waste water treatment plant with a certain time delay. The time delay indicates how long in average the water remains within the consumer before it is discharged into a natural system (e.g. river) after having been treated in the waste water treatment plant. Consumers replace a detailed simulation of an urban area and its sewer system. However if a more differentiated consideration of urban areas is needed, this can be achieved by using urban catchments, pipes and reservoirs (as retention structures within the sewer system).


Demand characteristics

Demand characteristics provide information about the desired amounts of water. These amounts can be defined via two different options.

Option 1: a constant hydrograph with a daily, monthly or annual pattern.

Option 2: a measured or generated time series in the time series management

Additional inflow characteristics

A consumers water demands can be met through more than one river basin or catchment. If a consumer acquires water from outside of the considered system a additional inflow into the system occurs. The additional inflow characteristics can be defined via two different options as well.

Option 1: a constant hydrograph with a daily, monthly or annual pattern.

Option 2: a measured or generated time series in the time series management

Discharge back into the system

Abbildung 46: Flows of a consumer

A consumer can't just receive additional inflow from other systems. It can discharge water into areas outside of the considered system. E.g. this would be the case if the water works are responsible for multiple supply zones and at least one of these zones is not within the system which is to be simulated. This method can be used to depict discharge characteristics of sewer systems into another area. This behavior corresponds to the simulation of connections/ transfers with/ into other catchments.

In these cases a consumer acts as a branching point. There are three possible concepts to represent this behaviour ( for more information please refer to Branching points).


Option 1: Threshold model

If discharge from the consumer back into the system surpasses a certain threshold, the amounts above this threshold are deducted respectively not reentered into the system.

Option 2: Percentage distribution

A certain percentage of the consumers discharge back into the system is deducted and is discharged into a different catchment and therefore is not reentered into the system.


Option 3: Distribution according to a characteristic curve

The deducted amount, which is discharged into other areas, is determined in dependency on the current discharge of the consumer back into the system.

The flows of a consumer are depicted in Abbildung 46 .