Abstract
Water resource management is a topic of great environmental and social relevance, since water must be preserved and managed to avoid waste, providing high quality service at fair tariffs for the consumer, as imposed by the European Water Directive (2000/CE). In the rehabilitation of a water distribution network, it may be suitable to recover decommissioned water tanks, if any, rather than afford high construction costs to build new ones. In this case, the assessment of the residual service life of these concrete structures affected by steel bar corrosion is the premise for the design of new pipeline routes, connecting them. For this aim, rather than carrying tests that can accurately determine mechanical properties of the dismissed water tanks, it is possible to empirically estimate their level of degradation. Their conditions infer on the expected life of the restructured water distribution network. However, they allow the aqueduct to be used for its technical duration, assumed to be equal to the decommissioned water tanks residual service life in the case they do not require maintenance. Here, a simplified model for the assessment of the residual service life of decommissioned water tanks is first proposed and then applied to a case study, consisting of a part of the water network managed by “Ausino S.p.A. Servizi Idrici Integrati”, Cava de’ Tirreni, Italy. Once the service life is assessed, the QEPANET plugin is used in QGIS to speed up the design of the new pipeline routes in the georeferenced space, thus overcoming the limits offered by the classic EPANET solver.
Highlights
Aging and consequent deteriorating of water distribution networks (WDNs) may yield leakage percentages up to 50% of the total input [1,2,3]
San Cesareo” and “Crocelle-Corpo di Cava”, solving the critical areas depicted in Figure 1 in terms of computed piezometric heads as specified, satisfying water demand with an adequate service level
Tank recovery implied the definition of the corresponding residual service life, assessed with the simplified methodology obtained by combining the Masada’s Condition Ratings [58] and the theory of Tuutti [61]
Summary
Aging and consequent deteriorating of water distribution networks (WDNs) may yield leakage percentages up to 50% of the total input [1,2,3]. A number of leakage estimation models have been proposed in recent decades (see for instance [8,9,10]). The Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), a public research organization main producer of official statistics for Italy, has periodically collected information on water resources for domestic use with the urban water census, at the aim of describing the state of urban water services in Italy. In 2015, total water losses amounted to 41.4% of the input water in the supply network, indicating a worsening compared to 2012, when the indicator reached a lower value of 37.4% [11]. The relatively applied low water tariffs together with the progressive decreasing of investments made it difficult to sustain service quality with the ageing of infrastructures [12]
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