Calibration of Design Models for Leakage Management of Water Distribution Networks

L Berardi,O Giustolisi

doi:10.1007/s11269-021-02847-x

Abstract

Water losses in urban water distribution networks (WDN) accelerate the deterioration of such infrastructures. The enhanced hydraulic modelling provides a phenomenological representation of WDN hydraulics, including the modelling of leakages as function of pipe average pressure and deterioration. The methodological use of such models on real WDN was demonstrated to support the planning of leakage management actions. Nonetheless, many water utilities are still in the process of designing flow/pressure monitoring, thus data available are not enough to perform detailed calibration of such models.This work presents a physically based approach for the calibration of WDN hydraulic models aimed at supporting leakage management plans since early stages. The proposed procedure leverages the key role of mass balance in enhanced hydraulic models and the technical insight on pipe deterioration mechanisms for various quantity and quality of available data. Two calibration studies of real WDNs demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and show that the distribution of leakages in the WDN does not much influence the pressure values, which confirms the need for flow measurements at monitoring districts for leakage and asset management.

Highlights

25–30% of drinking water is lost every year due to leakages in urban water distribution networks (WDN) [European Commission 2014] and aggregate Non-Revenue Water is 30% of water system input volumes across the world [Liemberger and Wyatt 2019]
Leakage reduction plans are carried on through contracts for the design of technical solutions. Such projects are based on existing models provided in EPANET or similar software format, where leakages are defined as fixed demand patterns at nodes. Such models prevents from comparing alternative leakage reduction actions, e.g. pressure control or pipe replacement, that are likely to modify the status of the pipelines and the pressure through the system
This paper aims at answering two new technical-scientific questions which are of direct relevance at earlier stages of planning leakage management: (i) how to realistically distribute losses spatially at the pipe level in enhanced hydraulic models using limited available data; (ii) understand, for a given global leakage level, how far pressure measurements can drive the spatial distribution of water losses in the model, i.e. how different spatial distribution of losses might affect pressures in the WDN

Summary

Introduction

25–30% of drinking water is lost every year due to leakages in urban water distribution networks (WDN) [European Commission 2014] and aggregate Non-Revenue Water is 30% of water system input volumes across the world [Liemberger and Wyatt 2019]. The regulatory bodies around the world have been motivating water companies towards effective countermeasures to reduce water losses in order to prevent major failure events and improve WDN efficiency and reliability. Leakage reduction plans are carried on through contracts for the design of technical solutions Such projects are based on existing models provided in EPANET or similar software format, where leakages are defined as fixed demand patterns at nodes. Such models prevents from comparing alternative leakage reduction actions, e.g. pressure control or pipe replacement, that are likely to modify the status of the pipelines and the pressure through the system

Objectives

Results

Conclusion