Abstract
The research presented was conducted to quantify the effects of butterfly and gate valves located upstream water meters with diameters larger than 50 mm. Errors caused by these valves can have an enormous financial impact taking into consideration that a small percentage of variation in the error of a large meter is typically related to a significant volume of water. The uncertainty on the economic impact that a valve installed upstream of a medium size water meter leads to many water utilities to oversize the meter chambers in order to mitigate the potential negative errors. Most manufacturers approve their meters for a specific flow disturbance sensitivity class according to the standard ISO 4064-1:2018. Under this classification, a correct operation of the meters requires a certain length of straight section of pipe upstream the meter. However, this classification of the meters cannot consider all types of flow perturbances. For this study, two types of valves, butterfly and gate, were tested upstream ten brand-new water meters from six different manufacturers constructed in four different metering technologies: single-jet, Woltmann, electromagnetic and ultrasonic. In each meter unit was tested at five flow rates, from minimum to the overload flow rates. The tests were conducted with valves set in different orientations, closing degrees, and upstream distances from the water meters under study. The research shows that the valves used can produce significant deviations in the measuring errors with respect the errors found for undistorted working conditions.
Highlights
Reducing water loses is an essential strategy for improving the efficiency and sustainability of a water utility
In order to standardize the results, and to facilitate their interpretation, characteristic test flow rates have been selected for each nominal diameter of the meters (Table 6)
Gate and butterfly valves may produce a great distortion on the error curve of a water meter when installed immediately upstream of the meter
Summary
Reducing water loses is an essential strategy for improving the efficiency and sustainability of a water utility. Two main components are part of these loses: real (physical) and apparent (commercial) [1]. Real loses are due to leakages in distribution mains, in storage tanks and in service connections [2,3]. On the other hand apparent loses are originated by unauthorised consumption [4,5], data handling errors [6,7], and customer meter inaccuracies [8,9]. These are probably the most important ones among all related to apparent loses. There are several reasons why these inaccuracies occur [8]: unavoidable measuring errors (meter device inherent accuracy and/or consumption profile [10,11,12,13]), device blocking by particles, device aging [8,14] and installation [15]. Optimal replacement programs [16,17] and in situ testing [18,19] are highly recommended to prevent metering errors
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