Simulating urban drainage hydraulics is computationally demanding, limiting its application in tasks that require real-time or repeated simulations. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are promising metamodels, but the effect of their internal components and transferability potential remain underexplored. This study addresses these gaps through two main contributions: (1) a systematic evaluation of key architectural components, including graph layer type, processor depth, and prediction window with links to physical transport dynamics; and (2) transferability experiments across domains (across two distinct drainage networks) and tasks (from head to flow prediction). As case studies, we selected two combined sewer networks in The Netherlands that differ in their hydraulic dynamics. We find that metamodels with moderate depth and a ten-step prediction window achieve high accuracy (RMSE of 2–5 cm for hydraulic heads and 0.02 m³/s for flowrates). They also reach speed-ups of up to four orders of magnitude higher compared to the physics-based model, SWMM, when executing parallel simulations in GPU. Based on our two case studies, we find that pre-trained metamodels with full fine-tuning effectively adapt to a new task within the same domain, whereas cross-domain transfer requires appropriate normalization and fine-tuning. Furthermore, joint training on both case studies enables the metamodel to capture representations of both systems, suggesting potential for more general applicability. These findings demonstrate that metamodel architecture can reflect physical system behavior and offer practical guidance for building fast, accurate, and generalizable GNN-based metamodels—establishing a foundation for their use in applications such as uncertainty analysis, design optimization, and nowcasting.

The illicit connections between sewage and stormwater pipes result in the discharge of untreated sewage into receiving rivers, posing significant odor and health hazards. While thioethers are recognized as key odorants in sewage systems, their distribution in stormwater systems remain poorly characterized. This study analyzed 12 types of thioethers in stormwater pipes sampled at 21 sites in China. Advanced analytical techniques, including Mantel analysis and Structural Equation Modeling, were employed to examine the relationships between overlying water properties, sediment microbial characteristics, and thioether concentrations. Results showed that sediment thioether loads (36.77 ± 50.14 μg S/m; range: 7.24–99.96 μg S/m) were substantially higher than those in the overlying water (12.02 ± 42.52 μg S/m; range: 0.03–92.76 μg S/m), highlighting sediment as a critical pollution reservoir. Dissolved oxygen, NH₃-N, and terrestrial-derived dissolved organic nitrogen were identified as key factors shaping sediment microbiome composition, particularly fermentative, sulfate-reducing, and denitrifying bacteria, which in turn drives thioether formation. Specifically, dominant compounds like dimethyl disulfide and dimethyl trisulfide were found to be produced through the anaerobic fermentation of methionine and redox conversion of methanethiol, as well as the anaerobic fermentation of cysteine and methylation of polysulfides. Humic substances could facilitate methanethiol redox conversion and polysulfide methylation by serving as methyl donors and enhancing electron transfer efficiency. Additionally, NH₃-N may promote microbial metabolism by providing amino groups essential for the synthesis of metabolic precursors. Therefore, effective mitigation of odorous thioethers in stormwater systems necessitates integrated strategies targeting both sulfur-containing organic precursors and nitrogen-rich pollutants.

The effective environmental management of combined sewer systems requires reliable estimation of discharge and pollutant loads conveyed at the outlet during rainstorms. This study investigates how, with a lumped modelling approach, it is possible to reproduce the quality characteristics of discharged water, provided that high temporal resolution experimental data of pollutant concentrations are available. The methodology is applied to the combined sewer of a real urban drainage network where a continuous high resolution monitoring campaign of water quality and quantity has been carried out at an overflow structure location near the outlet of the drainage system. The lumped modelling approach has been implemented in the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) with hydrological parameters estimated from cartographic information, based on recently proposed methodology that allows reliably simulating the storm hydrographs without model calibration. A semi-distributed model has been also developed using the SWMM with hydrologic parameters randomly sampled to fit the measured hydrographs of different training and validation data. The results obtained show that the uncalibrated lumped model simulates the observed hydrographs with similar performance as with the semi-distributed model (i.e., the normalized Nash-Sutcliff efficiency index of the validation set is 0.753 for the uncalibrated lumped model and 0.765 for the best-performing sampled parameter set of the semi-distributed model). The water quality parameters describing the build-up and wash-off of total dissolved solids (TDS) in a lumped model have been calibrated too, as well as those describing the mixing and consumption of dissolved oxygen (DO). The results show that a lumped modelling approach can reproduce the water quality dynamics in a combined sewer system, representing a promising tool for effective environmental management. However, event-specific calibrated parameter values have been obtained in some cases, which require further investigation and still limit the general applicability of the obtained results, thus confirming that setting up a reliable model requires water quality measurements.

Storm-driven runoff scours accumulated sediments within stormwater drainage systems, transporting multi-source pollutants (including pathogens) into surface water through stormwater overflows, thereby elevating contamination risks in the recipient. Chlorine-based disinfection of overflowed stormwater applied in related storage tanks mitigates these risks before release. This study reveals that chlorophenylacetonitriles (CPANs), which are formed during the disinfection process, exhibit toxicity levels higher than conventional trihalomethanes and haloacetonitriles. Laboratory analyses conducted in this work demonstrated that sewer sediments — not runoff or stormwater — are the dominant precursor source for CPAN formation during overflow disinfection. Source apportionment further identified a robust linear correlation (R² = 0.95) between sediment indole concentrations (0.093–0.91 μg/g) and CPAN formation, experimentally confirming for the first time that indole is a critical precursor. Laboratory experiments also uncovered the presence of monochloroindoles in indole chlorination, a novel class of aromatic nitrogenous disinfection byproducts (DBPs). In addition, density functional theory calculations demonstrated that monochloroindole formation has lower activation energy barriers compared to CPAN pathways, resulting in new molecular-level insights into their preferential transformation. Given that indole serves as a shared precursor for both highly toxic CPANs and even more ecotoxic monochloroindoles, this study emphasizes the urgent need for sewer sediment management to mitigate the ecological and human health risks associated with these highly toxic nitrogenous DBPs.

As cities expand and land becomes built over, more rainwater will run off rather than infiltrate or evapo(trans)pirate, increasing the likelihood of urban pluvial flooding. Stormwater management and planning is essential to ensure that urban areas are well adapted to climate change, involving cooperation between diverse actors with their own objectives. Current tools to support decision-making have a narrow technical focus and do not incorporate the multi-actor context. In this paper, we present a serious game called Urban dRain, developed with the aim to integrate technical assessment of blue, green and grey solutions and actor negotiation. In the game, participants are challenged to develop a stormwater management strategy for a Dutch neighbourhood in multiple rounds, first within their own separate groups, and then collectively. We present results from validation and play-testing the final game prototype with 70 students and researchers. Results show that the game supports socio-technical learning by encouraging players to come up with a range of stormwater management plans and negotiate for their individual goals while achieving a collective goal. The game demonstrates potential to bring actors with varying perspectives together and co-develop solutions to pluvial flooding, overcoming limitations of existing technology-focused tools.

There is a trend towards decentralized source separation (DSS) for wastewater treatment and resource recovery. An assessment framework is required to assess whether implementing a DSS treatment over a conventional centralized one is advantageous. This framework needs to account for the performance of the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and the effect that resource recovery has on closely-linked sectors such as food and energy production. A framework is lacking that covers the economic dimension, the circularity, the nature reciprocity of resource recovery and that can be applied to real-life cases. A novel WFE framework has been developed here to compare a conventional centralized and a DSS-based WWTP. This novel WFE framework contains assessment methods that are reproducible, and applicable to real-life cases. It also accounts for the local climatic conditions that determine irrigation water requirements. The comparison results revealed that the need to construct new DSS infrastructure leads to a lower economic efficiency of water treatment. Further, chemical-intensive treatment reduces the DSS's material resource circularity and efficiency. Using heat pumps increases the energy use of the DSS WWTP, causing a reduction in water treatment energy efficiency. However, the advantages of DSS show up in the freshwater and nutrient efficiency of food production as well as in the energy self-sufficiency of the WWTP. The novel WFE framework contains indicators specific to water treatment and the food production sectors to improve inter-sectoral communication. Also, including the nature reciprocity assessment can help demonstrate the issue with treated wastewater discharge, especially in arid regions with low stream flows. It can potentially help improve the acceptance of treated wastewater-based reuse. To conclude, the novel framework helps to assess real-life case studies in a more integrated and holistic way. It can help make decisions related to decentralization and source separation by simultaneously considering the water treatment, energy production, and food production sectors.

Accurate calibration of hydraulic models of water distribution systems (WDSs) is essential for reliable simulations. After eliminating gross errors, including those in estimated demands, pipe roughness coefficients (PRCs) are the most often used calibration parameters. Although numerous PRC calibration methods exist to ensure model simulations align well with field observations, they typically assume error-free pressure gauge elevations and overlook the compensatory interactions between elevation errors and PRC uncertainties. This often results in biased PRC calibration outcomes. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel framework that decouples elevation errors by minimizing the standard deviation of pressure residual time series, rather than relying on traditional residual minimization techniques. Additionally, a clustering-based data preprocessing approach is employed to reduce the impact of uncertain nodal demands and measurement noise. Tests on three benchmark networks demonstrate that the proposed method accurately calibrates PRCs, even when accounting for elevation inaccuracies, nodal demand uncertainties and measurement noise simultaneously. This establishes a new paradigm that leverages the statistical characteristics of residual time series to enable error-decoupled model calibration. Crucially, the method also quantifies pressure gauge elevation errors through post-calibration residual analysis, eliminating the need for costly field surveys. This advancement is particularly valuable for regions with missing or erroneous elevation data, significantly improving WDS calibration practices.

Urban drainage network models (UDNMs) have been widely used to facilitate flood management. Typically, a UDNM is developed using data from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and hence it consists of many short pipes and connection nodes or manholes. To improve modeling efficiency, a GIS-based model is generally skeletonized by removing many elements. However, there has been surprisingly a lack of knowledge on to what extent such skeletonization can affect the model's simulation accuracy, resulting in uncertainty in flood risk estimation. This paper makes the first attempt to quantitatively evaluate multidimensional impacts of different skeletonization levels on hydraulic properties of UDNMs. This goal is achieved by a new evaluation framework comprising of eight existing and new metrics that make use of hydrographs, main pipe hydraulics and flood distribution properties. A real-life UDNM is used to illustrate the new framework under various rainfall conditions and different skeletonization levels. The new framework is also used to compare the performance of two compensation methods in mitigating impacts caused by model skeletonization. Results obtained show that: (a) model skeletonization can significantly affect the magnitude of peak flow at the outfall, with a maximum overestimation of up to 20%, (b) hydraulics in main pipes can also be affected by model skeletonization with the maximum flow increasing up to 35%, and (c) model skeletonization may significantly alter the flood distribution properties which has been largely ignored in past studies. These findings provide guidance for UDNM skeletonization, where their associated impacts should be aware in engineering practice.

Addressing water scarcity requires significant attention to reducing water footprint (WF) related to food consumption. Since individuals' dietary behavior is largely influenced by their demographic and anthropometric attributes, it is crucial to identify individuals who have a high dietary WF and prioritize them as the focus of policies. Several studies analyzing the driving factors behind dietary WF exist but have multiple limitations. These include the statistical models with rather modest performances, lack of rigorous sensitivity analysis/feature importance (FI) analysis, and lack of generalization ability. Here, we developed a novel ML-based framework for analyzing the driving forces behind dietary WF. The framework incorporated three machine learning (ML) models (Extra-Trees (ET), Histogram-based Gradient Boosting (HGB), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB)) and an ML explanation approach Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). This framework was applied to a case study on Chinese inhabitants. The derived results validated the proposed framework and demonstrated ML's superiority over conventional statistical methods. XGB was identified as the optimal model as it effectively captured the variability in the data and showed good generalization performance. The FI analysis for XGB revealed the most influential features on dietary WF, with income level, urbanization level, education level, and gender emerging as the top four features in descending order. Through the subsequent SHAP dependence analysis, the priority groups for dietary WF reduction interventions were identified as high-income residents, urban residents, highly educated residents, and male residents. In light of these findings and their underlying causes, the paper concluded with a set of policy recommendations.

The odor nuisance of urban surface water after rainfall events has aroused public concerns and threaten the aquatic organisms. Herein, the first study to investigate 150 odorants in storm sewer discharge was performed in humid regions of China. During rainfall events, the total concentrations of odorants at storm sewer outlet increased by 1.3–2.1 fold from 1.7–9.4 μg/L to 2.1–20.0 μg/L with 37 odorants having detection frequencies above 50 % on rainy days, and the concentrations of total odorants in air also significantly increased resulting in worse odor nuisance. The accumulation of odorants in sewer sediment and the remobilization of sewer sediment were factors resulting in more intensified emission of odorants from storm sewer on rainy days. More than half of odorants discharged during rainfall were contributed by sewer sediment. Thioethers, indoles, 2-isopropyl-3‑methoxy pyrazine, acetophenone and coumarin exhibited high sediment-accumulation. Quantitative structure-property relationship models revealed that enhanced sediment-accumulation of chained aliphatic and aromatic odorants can be explained by the electrostatic attraction and topological characteristic, respectively. The multicriteria analysis was further introduced for relative odorants ranking by considering the variations in hazard criteria of environmental occurrence, ecotoxicity, persistence, odor nuisance and sediment accumulation. Among priority odorants, thioethers and indoles were attributed by their distinct sediment-accumulation and odor nuisance potential, while chlorinated anisole and pinenes prioritized due to their higher ecotoxicity. These findings provide novel insights into the odorants from storm sewer discharges and explore the environmental behaviors of odorants in sewer sediment.

Transportation of non-Newtonian fluids (NNFs) through pipelines is a cornerstone of modern infrastructure. While the laminar and transitional flows have been extensively studied, the turbulent behavior of NNFs remains poorly understood. This study investigates large-scale pipe-loop experiments on clay–water slurries, spanning Reynolds numbers ≈ 1.1×104–1.75×105 in a 100-mm diameter facility. Using non-invasive ultrasound velocity profiling (UVP) together with wall shear stress measurements, we characterize flows ranging from weakly to highly non-Newtonian conditions with concentrations up to 19%(w/w). The experiments show that the transition to the log-law region is delayed and the log-law intercept shifts upward with increasing concentration, reflecting the redistribution of stresses as shear-thinning and yield effects become more pronounced. To further interpret these findings, the experimental observations were compared with established modeling approaches. Semi-empirical correlations exhibited intermediate performance (mean absolute error, MAE, up to 0.55 Pa for wall shear stress and 0.15 m/s for velocity), while the Launder–Spalding wall function performed worst due to its assumption of constant viscosity (MAE ≈ 1.48 Pa and 0.08 m/s). In contrast, the rheology-based wall function achieved the most reliable predictions, with minimal deviations from experiments (MAE ≈ 0.20 Pa for wall shear stress and 0.06 m/s for velocity). Overall, this work provides a comprehensive experimental and modeling assessment of turbulent non-Newtonian pipe flow at an industrial scale, yielding new insights into flow physics and establishing a valuable reference for future experimental and computational studies.

This chapter presents a detailed description of the circularity and efficiency assessment methods to be used in the context of resource recovery solutions in the water sector. The resource recovery solutions are meant to produce multiple benefits, such as increased resource efficiency and decreased negative environmental impact, among others. The solutions need to be assessed and compared using a comprehensive set of criteria and indicators. This report discusses key concepts, explains methods, and briefly presents a spreadsheet tool developed for conducting the assessment. Some key concepts, such as circular bioeconomy and efficiency, are first introduced. Several resources may be recovered from the water sector, and thus, commonly recovered resources are classified. This is followed by an expansion of the scope of the material circularity indicator, a prevalent assessment method. This is done to apply the MCI to the resources relevant to the water sector. Equations for the resource categories are developed and presented. Efficiency is then defined as a ratio between the benefits and costs of a resource recovery solution. Two categories of cost indicators are introduced, followed by three categories of benefit indicators. By combining different cost and benefit indicators, several indicators such as simple material efficiency, service unit-based energy efficiency, and service unit ecoefficiency can be created. Circularity and efficiency assessment methods are explained with simple examples, and screenshots from the spreadsheet assessment tool are presented. Lastly, the assessment method is demonstrated on a real-life case study located in Italy. The case study involves reuse of treated wastewater (TW) for irrigation. The newly developed circularity and efficiency methods demonstrate the improvements in the circularity and efficiency resulting from TW irrigation reuse, along with pointing to the most crucial factors to be considered for such cases.

This review explores recent advancements in modeling the flow behavior of Herschel-Bulkley (HB) fluids in pipes, discussing theoretical, semi-empirical, computational, and experimental methods. While the laminar flow of non-Newtonian HB fluids can be effectively modeled using first-principle physics, significant challenges remain in turbulent and transitional flow regimes. Existing turbulence models, though widely used, may not always fully align with experimental data, often requiring further validation or complex mathematical tuning, leading to higher computational costs. Further, the transition to turbulence in HB fluids is influenced by shear-thinning and yield stress, yet current models often fail to account for this delayed transition. Consequently, stability and Reynolds number-based transition models can exhibit inconsistencies, limiting their broader applicability. Progress is further hindered by limited experimental studies, constrained by resolution, attenuation, cost, and material combinations. Inaccuracies in rheological modeling—due to inappropriate shear rate ranges, curve-fitting techniques, or simplifying assumptions such as homogeneity and non-elasticity—further complicate flow predictions. Through this review, we delve deeper into the state-of-the-art modeling of HB fluids, highlighting progress and these challenges. Addressing these limitations requires advanced experimental and numerical studies, particularly for near-wall measurements, to better capture flow complexities and improve model predictions. This could also facilitate the development of data-driven approaches and operational envelopes that define their validity thresholds. Future research should also prioritize the independent effects of yield stress and shear-thinning properties while considering material attributes and settling phenomena in non-Newtonian suspensions. Ultimately, these advancements will enable more accurate flow predictions and practical solutions for industrial applications.

Supervised deep learning methods have been widely employed to detect floating macroplastic litter (>5 mm) in (fresh)water bodies. However, few studies used them to quantify floating litter fluxes in rivers with wide cross-sections, that is important for pollution assessment. Additionally, commonly used supervised learning (SL) models rely on extensive labeled data, that is time-consuming and expensive to obtain. Moreover, regardless of the model type, current deep learning models for litter detection usually fail to correctly identify small litter items. To overcome these issues, we propose a semi-supervised learning (SSL)-based framework combined with Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) for quantifying cross-sectional floating litter fluxes in rivers. The framework includes four steps: (a) collecting camera images of river surfaces from multiple locations across the river, (b) developing a robust litter detection model using SSL, (c) applying this model with SAHI to detect litter items in images, and (d) post-processing the detection results to quantify fluxes. The SSL method involves: (i) self-supervised pre-training of a ResNet50 on a large amount of unlabeled data, and (ii) supervised fine-tuning of a Faster R-CNN with the ResNet50 backbone on a limited amount of labeled data. We evaluated the in-domain detection performance of SSL models with varying pre-training epochs and pre-training dataset sizes, using images from waterways of The Netherlands, Indonesia and Vietnam, that were used for model pre-training and fine-tuning. Additionally, we assessed the zero-shot out-of-domain detection performance of SSL models and litter flux quantification performance of the proposed framework on a Vietnam case study, that was not used for model development. We benchmarked our results against the SL methods and human visual counting. The results show that SSL models benefit from longer pre-training time and larger pre-training dataset, achieving an in-domain F1-score increase of 0.2 and a zero-shot out-of-domain increase of up to 0.14, over baseline SL benchmarks. Furthermore, the SAHI method correctly identifies 45 additional small litter items (areas < 1,000 cm2), improving the F1-score by up to 0.19, compared to the results obtained without SAHI. The flux measurement results indicate that the SSL-based framework substantially underestimates fluxes by a factor of 3–4 compared to human measurements, due to missed detections of transparent litter items and items entrapped in water hyacinths. However, it estimates nearly twice the fluxes of the baseline SL-based framework, aligning more closely with human measurements. These findings highlight the potential of SSL-based framework to enhance litter flux measurement. Scaling it with broader datasets could significantly advance global-scale litter monitoring systems.

Resources recovery can improve the economic efficiency and reduce the negative environmental impacts of municipal wastewater treatment plants (MWWTP). The recovered resources can also actively benefit the natural environment enabling a reciprocal relationship between human society and nature. Focusing on these benefits can reveal new resources recovery opportunities. Moreover, for certain environmental impact categories such as emissions of reactive nitrogen, mere damage reduction is insufficient because these emissions are already beyond planetary limits. However, quantitative methods to assess nature benefits are lacking. A new method is developed to calculate the potential nature benefits in three categories: Freshwater restoration, biomass assimilation of nutrients, and soil organic matter sequestration and it is demonstrated on a real-life MWWTP. Focusing on resources recovery helps to purify the wastewater sufficiently for discharge and to benefit the natural environment. Treated wastewater discharge into a river can support freshwater restoration depending on the effluent quality. High quality is achieved by the sufficient removal of the nutrients and organic matter and discharging into a high-flow stream. The recovery of nutrients helps to close the nutrient cycle through biomass assimilation. To maximize this benefit, the nutrient recovery efficiency from the MWWTP must be maximized. But, increasing the nutrient uptake efficiency in agriculture is also crucial, especially for nitrogen. The wastewater sludge products can be applied to soil to sequester organic matter and the products with low volatile solids should be preferred. The development of the new method is a start to recognizing and assessing the potentially positive role of humans in nature.

Intermittent water supply systems are prone to air entrapments during the pipe filling phase. This work aims to analyse and discuss the numerical results obtained by applying the recently developed AirSWMM model, an extension of SWMM incorporating air phase, to a laboratory network. Experimental data consisting of pressure-head at multiple locations and video recordings of air entrapments are collected in a single loop network with a high point, for different pipe-filling conditions, system layouts and node elevations. Experimental tests have shown that the air entrapment occurred not only at the high point but also throughout the pipe network, creating air pockets with elongated shapes and larger volumes than for single pipes. AirSWWM model with air-entrapment formation, growth and transport is tested in the pipe network, and results are compared with measurements. AirSWWM model can correctly locate large air pockets but underestimates their volume.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied to network data such as traffic flow and water distribution systems, yet their use in predicting the state of urban stormwater drainage systems remains rare. This study investigates the application of Graph-WaveNet (GWN), a type of GNN, in forecasting the states of stormwater systems in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Data was sourced from the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) spanning 43 rainfall events from 2020 to 2023. Based on the preceding 30 to 60 min of network states and rainfall data, GWN predicted junction inflows, pipe flow rates, and relative water depths (fraction of full area filled by flow) for lead times up to 20, 20, and 30 min, with an R2 greater than 0.6, respectively. Prediction accuracy declines with longer forecast horizons. GWN predicts more time steps ahead for pipes’ flow rates and junctions’ inflows, but fewer for relative water depths during peak versus non-peak periods. It is also more effective at predicting states of large pipes and connected junctions downstream, compared to smaller upstream components. GWN's accuracy improves significantly with precise rainfall nowcasting inputs. This study establishes a significant baseline for GWN's performance in predicting urban stormwater systems during rainfall events.

Bursts in water distribution systems (WDSs) lead to water wastage and negative environmental impacts. Optimizing pressure sensor placement (PSP) for effective burst detection is crucial for prompt response and adverse event mitigation. While many optimization methods are available for this purpose, their resulting PSP strategies often exhibit large variability caused by background noise or metering accuracy, representing low robustness. This consequently hinders the wide application of existing PSP methods for burst detection in WDSs. This study proposes a novel multi-objective PSP method aimed at maximizing burst detection while minimizing the number of sensors. Within this method, a new threshold metric is introduced to quantify the minimum detectable burst outflow across all pipes. The metric has the key advantage of taking into account the fact that the relative magnitude of the detectable threshold for different pipes is independent of noise, thereby addressing the low robustness issue. The proposed method is applied to three WDSs, and results show that it can consistently achieve robust optimal PSP strategies across diverse noise conditions. Comprehensive comparisons between the proposed method and the other benchmark approaches are conducted using five metrics, including detection performance and layout characteristics. These comparisons reveal the properties of each optimization method and show how detection performance is affected by various placement features. It is anticipated that the proposed method can be useful in engineering practice due to its great robustness in determining the optimal PSP strategies for burst detection in WDSs compared to other alternatives.

Modeling fully developed turbulent flow for Herschel–Bulkley (HB) fluids in pipes is a long-standing challenge. Existing semi-empirical, theoretical, and numerical methods are either inconsistent with experimental data or are validated for low Reynolds numbers. This study focuses on validating a novel approach using rheology-based wall functions within Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solvers. Simulations of wall shear stress and velocity profiles were conducted across a wide range of Reynolds numbers using a single-phase HB fluid, with measurements taken both upstream and downstream of a 90 pipe bend. Two turbulence closure models, the k–e model and the Reynolds stress model, were employed with the wall function implemented as a specified shear boundary condition. Results demonstrate significant improvements over the Newtonian-based models, such as standard wall function by Launder–Spalding or with available semi-empirical models, achieving strong statistical correlations and minimal deviation (from the experimental findings) at high Reynolds numbers. The study also examines the utility of the wall viscosity Reynolds number and assesses the reliability of semi-empirical models for HB fluids. These findings offer valuable insights for enhancing modeling accuracy in complex fluid flow scenarios, with potential applications spanning industries like mining, chemical processing, petroleum transportation, and sanitation systems, providing practical alternatives to costly experimental procedures in pipe systems.