Hydrology & Hydraulic Analysis

Performance You Can Count On—Because We Do the Work.

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Hydrology & Hydraulic Analysis

We provide comprehensive hydraulic analysis that ensures your systems deliver required capacity without risking overflows, cavitation, or catastrophic surge events. From open channel flow in treatment plants to high-pressure transients in transmission mains, we engineer the physics of water movement.

How We Deliver Value

An undersized pipe creates a permanent bottleneck; an oversized pump creates a permanent energy drain.

We optimize these systems to balance capital cost with operational performance. By accurately modeling system behavior—as we did to validate the capacity increase at the Northwest Bakersfield Water Treatment Plant—we help owners unlock potential in existing facilities and ensure new designs perform as promised.

We consistently save our clients time and money through…

Hydraulic Profile & Process Design

For the Fresno Southeast Surface Water Treatment Facility, managing the hydraulic grade line was critical to ensuring the plant could handle variable surface water flows while maintaining strict treatment standards. We ensure that flow splits are even and that weirs and channels are sized to prevent submergence or process upsets.

Surge and Transient Analysis

We perform advanced transient analysis to predict pressure surges caused by pump trips or valve closures. This is essential for projects like the Wasco Stored Water Recovery Unit, which involves significant pumping energy and long pipeline alignments.

Capacity Assurance & Debottlenecking

We analyze existing systems to find and fix these bottlenecks.

The Northwest Bakersfield Water Treatment Plant Increase Net Treatment Capacity Upgrade is a prime example of this discipline: we helped engineering teams identify exactly where the hydraulic limitations were, allowing for targeted upgrades that successfully increased the plant’s net output.

Stormwater & Flood Routing

W. M. Lyles Co. performs hydrology studies to calculate runoff volumes and peak flows, ensuring facilities are safe from inundation.

For the Silver Lake Headworks Reservoir, balancing the hydraulics of a massive storage structure with the surface drainage of a 15-acre public park required rigorous integration of civil grading and hydraulic engineering.

Engineering for Reality

W. M. Lyles Co. combines theoretical modeling with the practical reality of a self-performing contractor. We verify our models against field conditions, understanding that friction factors in a textbook don’t always match the reality of aging infrastructure.