About Hydra (Version 6.0):

HYDRA sewer modeling software helps you answer important "what if" questions that affect the capacity of your collection system.  HYDRA's flow loading tools help you create a realistic model quickly.  Hydraulic analysis is extremely fast, and you can model very large systems.

Uses of the HYDRA sewer model:
The sewer model you create with HYDRA will be a valuable tool for a variety of projects and tasks commonly part of municipal sewer management, including:

• Sanitary Sewer Master Planning

• Storm water Management

• Infiltration and Inflow (I/I) Studies

• Rehabilitation Projects

• Elimination of Overflows

• Collection System Design

• Development Impact Fee and Project Review.

Hydra was one of the first computer programs available for municipal sewer modeling.  In the almost 30 years Hydra has been continually used for sewer products, Hydra has become industry standard.

Hydra Features

Hydra 6 for Windows 95/98/NT

The Practical Decision-Making Tool for the Municipal Engineer

In collection system modeling, you have three basic choices of software: The first is rudimentary and lacks the power you need for full-scale analysis. The second is highly academic, so sophisticated you practically need a PhD in hydraulics and months to learn and understand just the program itself. PIZER's HYDRA 6 is the third choice: a practical decision-making tool. HYDRA 6 is strong enough to handle the full scale analysis you need, while simple enough that even an engineer new to sewer modeling can understand the benefits with reasonable effort.

Setting the Standard for Integrated Sewer Modeling

A commercial hydraulic model for practicing professional engineers since 1973, HYDRA has become an industry standard because of its uniquely practical approach to hydraulic analysis. HYDRA combines a user-friendly interface, powerful hydraulic analysis, and GIS features to provide the ultimate in sewer modeling for the municipal decision-maker. HYDRA 6 features and benefits makes the program flexible and powerful enough to satisfy all your basic sewer modeling needs.

Simply Gets the Job Done

HYDRA 6 provides the ideal sewer model for municipal engineers, directors of utilities, project managers, and consultants. For system capacity analysis, there is simply no better tool.  HYDRA can be used to model nearly ANY collection system, including stormwater systems, sanitary sewers, and combined systems. The new 32-bit engine further increases HYDRA's fast calculation speed. HYDRA's algorithms are sophisticated in areas where accuracy is critical, and practical where there is typically no need for intensive computations. The resulting analysis provides you with information you can use to determine future designs on storm and sanitary sewer project.

General Features:

Integrates with GIS:
HYDRA imports and exports data to and from standard geographic information system (GIS) data commonly used by municipalities.  This includes AutoCAD, ESRI's ArcInfo and ArcView, and other applications that can create a drawing interchange file (DXF).  Associated data can be included in file transfers.  You can map field data to ensure that the data is properly associated.  Because HYDRA stores data in a standard database DBF file format, you can also edit and manipulate your HYDRA data using an external database program.

Hydra exchanges data with

• ESRI ArcInfo and ArcView Shapefiles

• AutoCAD DXF files

• Also works directly with AutoCAD 12, 13, 14, or 2000

Stormwater Runoff Management:

HYDRA is a full-featured storm water analysis program.  It provides all the tools you need for simple to highly sophisticated urban stormwater runoff modeling for your stormwater management plan.

Stormwater Modeling Methods:
HYDRA models storm water runoff using any one of the following methods suited for urban watersheds:

• The Rational Method

• Santa Barbara SCS Method

• Hydrographic Simulation (Stanford Watershed Approach)

One of these 3 storm water calculation methods will be appropriate for any project.  If  you simply want to use an rainfall intensity/duration curve to quickly find the peak rate of runoff, HYDRA can do it.  If you need to perform true hydrographic simulation of historic rainfall events to model the effect of changes in paved surfaces over time, HYDRA can do it.

For Rainfall you can use

• Storm cell tracking across project basin

• Multiple rain gauges

• Rainfall from Radar Data

Sanitary Waste water Master Planning:
HYDRA gives you great flexibility in ways to generate sanitary flows for the model.  You can generate flows from any combination of a variety of methods.  You can organize data on layers by land use characteristics, or sanitary service areas (also called sewersheds or service basins), ownership parcel data.  You can also simply inject flows you have calculated yourself directly into any pipe, as is common with other sewer modeling software.

Models Combined Sewers:
As a mature and powerful sewer modeling program, HYDRA can model combined storm and sanitary sewer systems just as easily as a sanitary wastewater sewer, or a stormwater runoff project.  The standard HYDRA software package can model any type of flow. 

Highly Accurate Infiltration and Inflow Modeling:
HYDRA is very strong in the area of I/I modeling, offering a variety of modeling methods from simple to sophisticated.  HYDRA's unique Defect Database method offers innovative tools to help the user realistically simulate infiltration, inflow, and interflow.  Because of these unique and powerful features, HYDRA is the model of choice of many I/I experts.

HYDRA can model a variety of types of infiltration into the collection system.  HYDRA tracks each type of flow separately, so you can easily see what source is contributing to flows at any point in the conveyance system.

• Groundwater infiltration - GWI

• Rainfall-derived infiltration - RDI

• Stormwater inflow - SWI

Hydra offers a variety of methods to model infiltration to suit any project requirement.

• Population-based:  Volume / capita / day

• Area-based:  Volume / area / day

• Pipe Length-based: Volume / distance of pipe / day

• Pipe Diameter-based:  Volume / pipe diameter / distance of pipe / day

• Defect-based:  Uses data on condition of conveyance system to model flows from actual storm events

Rehabilitation Studies:
HYDRA includes powerful features to help you determine the most effective plan to restore system capacity lost to infiltration and inflow.  You can use HYDRA to model different pipeline rehabilitation scenarios to determine the impact on overall flows.

Development Impact Fees and Project Review:
You can use Hydra to help your community finance capital improvement projects needed to accommodate new development projects.  See how proposals will affect system capacity before a sewer connection permit is issued.

Hydra helps you quantify what the real impact on existing infrastructure will be.  More and more cities are using Hydra for current planning decisions.  You can quickly add the the additional flow to the existing collection system model and run a hydraulic analysis. 

SWMM module for Hydra:
This new module available for Hydra allows users to model portions of their sewer collection system with SWMM.  This breakthrough in modeling technology means users can take full advantage of the strengths of both analytical programs.

How it works ?
Starting with a Hydra model of your entire collection system, you set up flows for flow loading, and run a hydraulic analysis on the system, as usual.  If there are key areas that require additional analysis, you create a selection set of that part of your system you want to analyze with SWMM.  Then in Hydra's Tools menu, simply click on the "SWMM Analysis" option.  Hydra will create a complete SWMM input file (.DAT) for those selected entities, including flows in the K3 cards, ready for analysis.  You can then run analysis in EPA SWMM EXTRAN, or any other sewer modeling program that reads a SWMM input file.