Calibration of Design Models for Leakage Management of Water Distribution Networks

L. Berardi () and O. Giustolisi ()
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L. Berardi: University “G. D’Annunzio” of Chieti Pescara
O. Giustolisi: Technical University of Bari

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2021, vol. 35, issue 8, No 15, 2537-2551

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Water distribution networks; Model calibration; Leakage model; Mass-balance calibration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11269-021-02847-x

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