Node Types

This table introduces the most commonly used Pywr node types:

Node Type
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Brief Description

Input Node

Input nodes represent water inputs into the system.

Catchment Node

Catchment nodes are often used to represent river or other type of inflow into the system.

Proportional Input Node

Proportional input node is intended for a simple case of where fixed ratio of flow is required to be distributed to multiple downstream routes.

Link Node

Link node represents a link in the water system or other point of interest where a maximum or minimum flow constraint or an allocation priority are assigned.

River Node

River node is a node in the river network, which may have multiple upstream nodes (i.e. a confluence) but only one downstream node.

Delay Node

These delay flow for a given number of timesteps or days. This is used when flow propagation time cannot be ignored, for example because time-steps are relatively short.

Storage Node

Storage node is a general node that can store water (like dams or aquifers), which have a minimum and maximum volume restrictions.

Reservoir Node

Reservoir node is a type of storage node with additional functionality to represent evaporation and precipitation.

Output Node

Output nodes are locations where water leaves the system.

Loss Link Node

Loss link allows for the definition of a fixed proportional loss of flow that goes through this node.

Turbine Node

Turbine node can represent a turbine of a hydropower station. It calculates the flow required to generate a particular hydropower production target in each time step.

Pywr Node types can also be further sub-divided into 6 categories: Water Input, Water Transport, Water Storage, Water Output, Hydropower, and Others. You can find more details about these groupings of nodes and nodes types in the sub-sections of the 'Node Types' section.

More details

An overview of nodes in Pywr can be found here. The full list of built-in nodes in Pywr can be found here.

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