Hydraulic transients in pressurized pipe systems are significantly influenced by the presence of entrapped air, which alters wave propagation through increased compressibility and energy dissipation. Traditional discrete cavity models, such as the Discrete Gas Cavity Model (DGCM), often assume a constant wave celerity, which limits their accuracy under high gas content conditions. This study evaluated different approaches for representing the effects of gas cavities and unsteady friction in closed pipe transients. The work introduces the Adjustable-celerity Gas Cavity Model (AGCM), a formulation that explicitly couples local air volume and pressure to dynamically adjusted celerity values. Two variants are considered, a non-iterative (AGCM.v1) and an iterative approach (AGCM.v2), the latter ensuring consistency between pressure head and celerity at each time step. The models were evaluated through numerical simulations using both experimental datasets and a hypothetical test case with increasing air fractions. Results show that the AGCM was able to represent celerity magnitudes in unsteady flows with large fractions of air. Also, while constant-celerity models perform well under low-air conditions, variable-celerity formulations offer superior consistency in predicting wave amplitudes and celerity dynamics as gas content increases. These findings underscore the importance of dynamic celerity coupling in transient flow modeling and validate the AGCM as a useful approach for transient modeling in conditions with higher air phase fractions.
Pinto et al. (Fri,) studied this question.