EPANET Assessment of the Inflating Time of Water Cushions for an Aqua Park in Romania.

The paper deals with some aspects related to the shape of an indoor surfing platform for an aqua park. The authors have proposed a method and a strategy to modify the shape of the platform in order to be suitable for different types of surfers, beginners or advanced. The membrane is basically a water mattress consisting of 6 independent cushions attached to one another, that will allow different inflation pressures, hence different slopes on the upper surface of the elastic membrane. The scope of the paper is to provide an answer to the questions what is the inflation/deflation time of the mattress and what is the energy consumption for this operation. Thecomputationshave been conducted using EPANETfreewareand the results have shown a total time of initial expansion of more than 3 hours, an inflation/deflation time around two hours and one hour respectively. The total energy consumption resulted of about 2.4 kWh for the initial expansion stage and 1kWh for the inflation stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]