Finding the flow of water in a connected network
I have a set of water meters for water consumers drawn up as geojson and visualized with ol3. For each consumer house i have their usage of water for the given year, and also the water pipe system is given as linestrings, with metadata for the diameter of each pipe section.
What is the minimum required information I need to be able to visualize/calculate the amount of water that passed each pipe in total of the year when the pipes have inner loops/circles.
is there a library that makes it easy to do the calculations in javascript.
Naive approach, start from each house and move to the first pipe junction and add the used mater measurement for the house as water out of the junction and continue until the water plant is reached. This works if there was no loops within the pipe system.
This sounds more like a physics or civil engineering problem than a programming one.
But as best I can tell, you would need time series data for sources and sinks.
Consider this simple network:
Say, A is a source and B and D are sinks/outlets. If the flow out of B is given, the flow in |CB| would be dependent on the flow out of D.
So e.g. if B and D were always open at the same time, the total volume that has passed |CB| might be close to 0. Conversely, if B and D were never open at the same time the number might be equal to the volume that flowed through |AB|.
If you can obtain time series data, so you have concurrent values of flow through D and B, I would think there would exist a standard way of determining the flow through |CB|.
Wikipedia's Pipe Network Analysis article mentions one such method: The Hardy Cross method, which:
"assumes that the flow going in and out of the system is known and that the pipe length, diameter, roughness and other key characteristics are also known or can be assumed".
If time series data are not an option, I would pretend it was always average (which might not be so bad given a large network, like in your image) and then do the same thing.